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THE LIFE INDEED 



To reach the ultimate, angels' law, 
Indulging every instinct of the soul 
There where law, Hfe, joy, impulse are one thing ! 

Browning, A Death in the Desert 



THE LIFE INDEED 

A REVIEW, IN TERMS OF COMMON 

THINKING, OF THE SCRIPTURE 

HISTORY ISSUING IN 

IMMORTALITY 



BY 

JOHN FRANKLIN GENUNG 

LATE PROFESSOR OF LITERARY AND BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION 
IN AMHERST COLLEGE 




BOSTON 

MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 

1921 






COPYRIGHT-I92 I -BY 
MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 



FEB -5 IS21 



THE PLIMPTON P R E S S • N O R W O O D ' M A S S • U • S • A 



O)CU608608 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

John Franklin Genung, by John Mason Tyler . . vii 

I. On the Larger Scale i 

I. THE SCALE HITHERTO PREVAILING ... 8 
II. ENLARGEMENT DEMANDED BY EVOLUTIONARY 

SCIENCE IQ 

III. ENLARGEMENT AS MEASURED BY SCRIPTURE 

CONCEPTIONS 28 

II. The Twilight Stratum ....... 37 

I. the empire OF LAW AND FATE .... 43 

II. THE ADVENT OF THE SPIRIT 54 

III. EARLY SPIRITUAL REACTIONS 60 

IV. THE BURDEN AND THE CRAVING .... 66 

III. Nearing the Fulness of the Time ... 71 
I. the end of the cosmic tether .... 77 

II. ON THE FRONTIER OF ADULT LIFE. ... 83 

III. THE SOUL OF PROPHECY. 89 

IV. The Law of the Spirit of Life .... 103 

I. THE SECOND BIRTH 1 15 

II. THE OUTWARD CURRENT I32 

III. THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN . . . 154 

V. The Supreme Historic Venture .... 177 

I. from the exceeding high mountain . . 196 

II. THUS IT BECOMETH US 221 

III. TO THIS END WAS I BORN 235 

IV. THE DECEASE ACCOMPLISHED AT JERUSALEM. 249 

V 



vi CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

VI. Naturalizing the Accomplished Fact . . 267 

I. EYE-WITNESSES OF HIS MAJESTY .... 274 

IL SINAI VERSUS SION 28O 

III. THE MIND OF SAINT JOHN 285 

IV. THE MIND OF SAINT PAUL 3OO 

VII. Inventory of Vital Values 315 

I. the unveiled mystery 320 

II. though our outward man perish . . . 332 

III. WHY stand ye gazing UP INTO HEAVEN.? . 3 50 



JOHN FRANKLIN GENUNG 

John M. Tyler 

ABOUT the middle of the seventeenth century John 
Guenon, a Huguenot born near La Rochelle, arrived 
in New York and became one of the first settlers at 
Flushing, L. I. He married Margreta Sneden, a native of Am- 
sterdam. Not far from 1700 another Huguenot, having the 
name of Petell, was admitted to citizenship at Boston. His 
daughter married Andrew Nichols, a Scotchman from the 
north of Ireland. Their daughter became the wife of Daniel 
Dye, a soldier in the Revolution, and probably of Dutch de- 
scent. The Dyes were characterized by kindliness, sense of 
humor, and love of music; Daniel Dye's wife certainly ought 
to have inherited an abundance of firmness of character. 

The name Guenon had by this time been corrupted or 
changed, as was usually the case with the fine old French 
names, into Genung or Ganong. Abram Genung married 
Martha Dye, and their son, John Franklin, was born at Wil- 
seyville in southern New York, January 27, 1850. Martha 
Dye had several brothers who were ministers. Abram Genung 
was partly a farmer, but evidently by preference a carpenter- 
builder. For this was still the time when the builder was also 
carpenter and architect and could whittle out a tall-spired 
New England church or a fine old colonial farmhouse, worthy 
of the name of mansion. He had vision and a keen sense for 
proportion and values. 

The child John and his twin brother grew up on the farm 
at Wilseyville. Here was the early environment and educa- 
tion which, even more than school or college, made the farmers^ 
sons of that generation leaders in all communities. Every 
ploughing probably brought up a new stratum of stones to be 



viii THE LIFE INDEED 

picked up by the boys. The farm was a hive of all sorts of 
industry. Here the boy had abundant physical, industrial, 
and manual training: to name only a few of his daily exercises, 
nature study and care of animals were unavoidable; he had 
his share in the responsibilities of the family, and it was no 
small one; he learned firmness and self-reliance, skill and in- 
genuity through emergencies. The stranger, though a friend, 
dares not invade and describe the family life, the moral and 
spiritual atmosphere, of that Huguenot, Dutch, Scotch-Irish 
household. We know what it must have been; John had time 
and opportunity to think for himself. Church and ^'little red 
schoolhouse" did the rest. 

In 1864 his parents ^ 'moved to Owego for the sake of better 
school advantages," — as Professor Genung says in the ''Vita" 
at the end of his doctor's thesis. Here he attended an acad- 
emy, a great institution in those days, usually led and governed 
by a man of some learning and more power and vitality. He 
made such use of his time and opportunities that after four 
years he was admitted to the junior class of Union College. 
It was a day of comparatively small things and advantages in 
all our colleges. Their material equipment was very meagre, 
the recitation rooms were bare and ugly, the library was practi- 
cally a sealed book to most students. The professors were 
pioneers none too well prepared for their special work; but 
there were among them strong men well aware of their own 
limitations and resolved that students standing on their 
shoulders should gain a wider and clearer view of the glories 
of the promised land of learning. 

Among these was one of whom Professor Genung spoke 
often with especial love and reverence. Professor Tayler 
Lewis was a deep and broad scholar. In spite of hindrances 
and difficulties he had gained a thorough knowledge of Latin 
and Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, and was a profound student 
of the Bible. He was soaked through and through with ori- 
ental literature, thought and spirit. In 1855, when the theory 
of evolution had been forgotten, not to be revived until the 
publication of Mr. Darwin's "Origin of Species" almost fifteen 



JOHN FRANKLIN GENUNG ix 

years later, Professor Lewis published his ^'Six Days of Crea- 
tion/' in which he showed that the generally or universally 
accepted crude conception of immediate creation of species 
was unscholarly and unbiblical and against the whole spirit of 
oriental thought. He was vigorously denounced by a few 
theologians and scientists, but was generally disregarded and 
neglected, the usual fate of a pioneer thinker too far in ad- 
vance of his age. He replied vigorously in a second book, for 
he was a ^'mighty man of valor," and the subject dropped. 
Professor Lewis showed the hungry young Genung the ^'beauty 
that was Greece" and the little known glory and depth of 
oriental thought, and taught him how to study the Bible and 
literature. All this was but a small part of what the old hero, 
laying off the harness, did for his young pupil and disciple. 
He might well have said with Nestor: "My teaching made 
thee great." 

Mr. Genung completed a course in theology, and was pastor 
of a church from 1875 to 1878. But during his pastorate his 
desire to study and to prepare for teaching grew continually 
stronger. In October, 1878, he entered the University of Leip- 
zig, where he remained for three years, excepting six months' 
stay in London. He devoted himself to English literature. 
Biblical study was not neglected, but does not seem to have 
stood first in his thought and interest. He was laying founda- 
tions. His doctor's thesis was a careful and thorough study 
of Tennyson's "In Memoriam." He returned to Amherst Col- 
lege, taught rhetoric, and wrote a text-book on the subject 
which has been used throughout the country. 

What attracted him most was not so much the beauty of 
form or style or even of content as the truthful expression of 
life. His work on "In Memoriam" is a study, not of versifi- 
cation and poetry, but of a soul in pain and struggle. This 
was the expression of the Huguenot, Dutch, and Scotch strains 
in his richly blended blood. He loved beauty of expression, 
but it was largely the beauty of exact, definite truthfulness. 
The first draft of any manuscript never satisfied him; it must 
be written again and rewritten. Every word and sentence must 



X THE LIFE INDEED 

be true to his thought and message, though the rewriting some- 
times worked injury to his style. With his ancestry he could 
not do otherwise than ^'hold his rudder true." 

From the same source came his steady, firm self-determina- 
tion and his dour pertinacity. He was a prodigious worker, 
doing a day's task before most of us had left our beds, and still 
having time for a walk before breakfast. His sturdy body 
seemed incapable of weariness. He appeared never to have ex- 
perienced hurry, worry, or fret. His college duties and exer- 
cises were never neglected; every lecture and recitation was 
most carefully prepared. Every theme handed to him was read 
with painstaking, and usually with pain, and the supposed 
value was scrupulously entered in a large book. But almost 
every year there appeared a new study, of close thought and 
rare finish, the product of a brain which seemed to grow and 
flourish and work while other men slept. 

In the presence of meanness or falsehood he could be a blaze 
of indignation. But his humanity and humanitarianism were 
too large to allow him to devote overmuch anxiety to class- 
room discipline. If certain ''lewd fellows of the baser sort" 
in the rear seats were conspicuously inattentive, listless, and 
heedless, he quietly kept on "casting pearls." Once in an un- 
usually vigorous written protest he characterized some pupils 
as personae non gratae, but I believe that they remained 
through the course. One of them is to-day one of his most 
ardent, though not most learned admirers. Like some of the 
rest of us, he was sometimes or often imposed upon, but it 
had its compensations. 

Soon the vitality and heart of the man began to draw him 
from the books of modern writers to the wisdom literature 
of the Bible, the grand drama of Job, the shrewd results of 
ages of experience crystallized in Proverbs, and the ripe ob- 
servation and thought of Ecclesiastes ; to the far vision of the 
Prophets and the companionship of the Apostles and their 
Master. This was his real lifework, a labor of love, completed 
by him when the second volume of his ''Guide Book to the 
Biblical Literature" appeared a few months before his death. 



JOHN FRANKLIN GENUNG xi 

He had no great enthusiasm for academic textual criticism, 
for wild guesses, or for negative results. His sane common 
sense and feeling of values had taught him that to sift merely 
the chaff out of a grand literature was hardly worth while. He 
was searching for wisdom and life, and he either found it, or, 
if not, he did not publish a tome to inform others how little 
he had discovered or appreciated in a great treasure house. 
Scholars and plain people enjoyed him. His research was 
patient, broad and deep, original and individual, like that of 
the teacher whose mantle had fallen on his shoulders. He 
was never afraid to stand alone. 

He followed the gleam with intent and single eye, and when 
pursuing a line of truth he had little interest in any other sub- 
ject. If you asked him about Jeremiah, you might sometimes 
be surprised to receive in answer a flood of information about 
the early Perizzites; and you could not win him over to your 
interests. At that time his mind was occupied by Perizzites. 
He thought hard and to good purpose. 

He had plenty of avocations. He was editor of The Amherst 
Graduates' Quarterly from its start. He loved music and was 
always a member of two or more orchestras. On this subject 
he was ready to talk gladly. He was chairman of the Town 
Planning Board, and could always find time to map a new 
street or design a bridge or a building. Here too he showed 
the same sanity and accuracy of thought that characterized 
his scholarship. He was the minister's right-hand man in the 
church. When the Jones Memorial Library was founded, he 
was eager to help. Some of the choicest sets of literature in 
his private library will form by his expressed wish the nucleus 
of a literary corner in its reading room. He had as many 
neighbors as the Good Samaritan. He once said to a friend: 
"When I die, I hope some one will say: ^Is John Genung dead? 
It's too bad.' " His hope was fulfilled a thousand fold. 

After his death there was found among his papers the 
manuscript of a new book entitled "The Life Indeed." Here 
he brought together the results of all his explorations in 
modern and ancient literature, in science as well as in the 



xii THE LIFE INDEED 

Bible, in one volume. It is his last message, crystallized out 
of study, thought, and the experience of trial, struggle, and 
success — out of a broad and deep life. It is an altogether 
fitting last word. Life and life indeed was his specialty. 

There are some men whose size you do not appreciate until 
you stand close to them and measure them by yourself. Then 
you recognize their stature and breadth of shoulders and know 
that you are looking at a big man. We all had this feeling 
when we met our friend and caught a glimpse of the size and 
symmetry of his soul and heart. The Greeks would have 
spoken of his sound mind and inward strength. There was 
nothing of Zarathustra's ''reversed cripple" about John Ge- 
nung. Says Professor Huxley: ''That man, I think, has had a 
liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his 
body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and 
pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; 
whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts 
of equal strength and in smooth working order; ready, like a 
steam-engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the 
gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose 
mind is stored with the great and fundamental truths of Na- 
ture and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted 
ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained 
to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender con- 
science; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature 
or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself." 
Genung pressed towards the goal of a liberal education. 

After all, is it true that salvation is nothing more nor less 
than wholeness, the attainment of perfect health; that health, 
haleness, wholeness, and holiness are all one in root-meaning? 
Did we all rightly as well as instinctively draw close to Genung 
because "virtue went out of him?" Is health more infectious 
or contagious than disease? And we cannot help noticing that 
such men of sound sense and good taste as Genung and Dr. 
Hitchcock always had a surprising predilection and hearty 
liking for sinners — such apparently was also the mind of the 
Master. And sinners loved them. Such abounding, overflow- 



JOHN FRANKLIN GENUNG xiii 

ing, health-giving lives are the irrefutable argument for im- 
mortality. The "narrow stream of death" is altogether too 
shallow to overwhelm a great soul. Try as hard as we will, 
it is impossible to imagine them as dead. They heard the 
sunset gun, rested a little on their arms, but at sunrise were 
again marching on refreshed and renewed to the service and 
victories of a brighter day. 



I 

ON THE LARGER SCALE 

BY WHAT MEASUREMENT ALONE AN ETERNAL OUTLOOK 
OF LIFE IS ATTAINABLE 

I. The Scale Hitherto Prevah^ing 
II. Enlargement Demanded by Evolutionary Science 
III. Enlargement as Measured by Scripture Conceptions 



THE LIFE INDEED 

I 

ON THE LARGER SCALE 

TO believe in immortality is one thing," says Robert 
Louis Stevenson, ''but it is first needful to believe 
in life.'' These words, more far-reaching than 
their simplicity betokens, contain the key to the study on 
which we are now entering. To believe in immortality, — 
late as our day of the world is, and full of knowledge, men 
are still trying as desperately and dimly as ever to do this. 
But they are so constituted that belief cannot come by trying 
to believe; cannot be made out of whole cloth, cannot be 
made at all. It is a thing wholly beyond the power of 
councils or sages or churches or creeds to engender. It 
must, like knowledge, like science, be built on valid grounds 
and verifiable data; must in the end be not only desirable 
but reasonable. 

Where then shall the grounds and data of a belief in 
immortality come from? There has been no lack of strenuous 
search. Nature and mind, the secrets of matter and the 
underworld of human consciousness, have been ransacked 
for them; thus far it would seem, if we may judge by the 
still prevaiHng doubt, to little conclusive purpose. The great 
majority of open-eyed inquirers are still confessing, 'We 
have but faith, we cannot know"; as if this were about equiv- 
alent to giving up the case. But somehow the case does not 
consent to be put out of court. It still has secondary rights 
to be heard^ if not the main one. There yet remains the 
question how much it means to have faith, as so many have, 
even against the apparent grounds of faith; and more stimu- 
lating still, the question, If we cannot know this, this direct 

3 



4 THE LIFE INDEED 

fact of immortality, what can we know? And I think it will 
turn out that there is more knowledge available, and knowl- 
edge of greater value, than we have been aware of. The 
century's austere spirit of doubt, like a lion in the way, has 
scared us; so that we were too timid to recognize, calmly 
and wisely, the data that are in plain sight before us. 

The proposition to which this study is committed is, that 
whatever the ultimate source of these grounds and data of 
immortality, they can be found nowhere except in life itself, 
in the normal and rounded life of manhood, what I here call 
the Life Indeed. Even if they come by what is termed 
revelation, they must needs come not by portent and miracle, 
not by some unmotived irruption from without, but by the 
way of our common human existence. They must come in 
response to an appetency and an assimilative power already 
there, already native to manhood, rather than by something 
extra-human superinduced. This is but another way of saying 
what Emerson said years ago, that immortality will come to 
such as are fit for it, and that he who would be a great 
soul in future must be a great soul now. But this does not 
close the case; it only opens the more vital question. What 
is it then to be a great soul, to be fit for immortality? 
Is it in man at all, as we can compass his life's worth and 
vv^ealth, to be a candidate for so high a destiny? This throws 
us back from the grave and its sequel to the arena of char- 
acter and action; it calls on us to raise manhood life to its 
highest power; in other words, it stipulates, as I said to begin 
with, that before we reach the point where we can believe 
in immortality we learn to believe in life. 

If our study were to depend on voluminous reading, there 
is no dearth of material. The subject, in various stages and 
aspects, is just now beyond most others, as we say, in the air. 
For the latest views, kept supposedly up to date, one need 
only instance the Ingersoll Lectureship ; so I need not ask 
here what Professor Ostwald thinks about it, and Professor 
Osier, and Professor James, and Professor Royce, and Pro- 
fessor Wheeler, and John Fiske, and Doctor Gordon. Nor 



ON THE LARGER SCALE 5 

would I here do less than pay them all the tribute of heartiest 
honor, as men able and authoritative, who have enriched our 
theme from many sides. It is forever too late, with their 
weighty contributions in mind, to re-echo that cheap sneer 
of Omar Khayyam: 

Myself when young did eagerly frequent 
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument 

About it and about: but evermore 
Came out by the same door where in I went. 

And yet — can we say that any of them have really, as the 
old phrase is, touched the spot? As these little books have 
come out year by year, each from its point of view so frankly 
admitting that we know but in part, I have caught myself 
wondering when, if at all, the Ingersoll Lectureship was going 
to raise the question, What does the Bible say about it? For 
it seems to me that the Bible, rightly weighed and digested, 
more nearly touches the spot than any other book or science 
or philosophy that has been or can be written; that all that 
is true in these others gets its light from the Bible way of 
looking at things; and that the gaps and holes in these 
others are filled and rounded out there. I am not saying 
this of the Bible, however, according to our conventional way 
of regarding it; though I raise no objection to this. We 
have got so used to reading it in a Sunday frame of mind, 
or only as fitting it mentally to some theological system, that 
v/e were well nigh color blind to its natural and cosmic 
significance. In spite of the analysis and criticism that we 
have laid out upon it, we are still reading it according to 
a long stereotyped formula. And so doing we are getting 
even as Bible scholars behind the age. With minds wonder- 
fully enlarged and quickened in other lines, we are still letting 
our Bible thoughts jog along in the same old pious and petty 
harness. We are as yet very imperfectly aware how pro- 
foundly the Bible history and thoughts are changed, as we turn 
upon them conceptions which have advanced, so to say, from 
Ptolemaic to Copernican. 

Here is where the Bible view that I wish now to present 



6 THE LIFE INDEED 

comes in. I want to see how it squares with our common- 
day conceptions and terms; with the ideas that are potent 
to-day to move us: how it identifies itself with what nature 
and human nature are revealing to us otherwise. The Bible 
has been ignored hitherto, I apprehend, in the interest of 
science; which supposedly could not mix with revelation and 
must therefore be its foe. Well, my contention is that this is 
a false position. I maintain that the Bible itself is in the 
interest of science, and only so; that on the subject we have 
in hand, saying now nothing of its other involvements, it is 
the one truly scientific treatment we have. We may call it, 
in the most exacting and authentic sense, the world's sufficing 
text-book of immortality. 

Note then that this text-book of ours bears one plain mark 
of the scientific attitude: it takes its stand on the ground not 
of theories and metaphysical speculations, but of actual fact. 
Its method is historical. It records, with clear indication of 
the time and the causes and the agency, the fact that life and 
immortality were brought to light in this world. That great 
event took place comparatively late in its chronicled account. 
We can look back from it therefore over a period wherein pre- 
sumably life and immortality were not yet in light but in 
gloom, or perhaps in a gradually brightening twilight. Look- 
ing back, then, as we have such warrant, we find it even so. 
We come upon a long stretch of time in which no word about 
a life beyond this life is spoken, and in which the idea of im- 
mortality, even if it exists, has no motive power at all. Then 
later we hear the wisest and piousest man in the world asking 
doubtfully, 'Tf a man die, shall he live again?" Later still 
we hear another wise man, puzzled with the knotty problems 
of being, almost indignantly maintaining that we can know 
nothing about it. And yet in spite of this depth of agnosticism 
there comes later the announceent that life and immortality 
are revealed, that they lie clear and illuminate before us. 
Here evidently is the record of a great revolution in knowledge 
and insight, amounting to all the difference between darkness 
and light. The Bible history is a history which sounds a dim 



ON THE LARGER SCALE 7 

and perilous way through men's progressive thoughts and 
ideals, and issues in immortality. 

Note one or two things further. Our text-book does not 
say that in those earlier times, and for those earlier people, 
immortality did not yet exist. It raises no question of when 
it began to be a fact, but simply of when it began to be seen, 
when it came to light. Note again, that when immortality 
first came to light, then first life itself came to light; the two 
came into the field of vision together. It would seem then 
that in those primal ages of gloom and twilight men did not 
know fully how to live. Like the animals, in some degree, 
they were nourishing a blind life within the brain, hardly 
aware what it all meant. Here then is a momentous history to 
trace: the long slow development whereby manhood was get- 
ting its eyes open to see a destiny which had always existed; 
the passing from blindness, perhaps through dimness and fit- 
ful glimmers, to full eyesight, from midnight to the light of 
day. Here we are shown what is the soul's plight before the 
light has come; what its joy and emancipation after; and how 
that immortality which was revealed along with life looks in 
the diffused daylight. Such a course of history, which in fact 
but represents the matter-of-fact scripture current, kindles the 
imagination by the splendor of its promise; it is close yoke- 
fellow to poetry; but does it not also look sane and interre- 
lated and reasonable? 

We are going now to trace it; very badly and condensedly, 
as must needs be in our space; but first we must determine 
the scale on which our minds shall work. On a small scale 
we can make only small measurements and get a petty out- 
look. A pint-cup is no fitting instrument to judge an ocean 
by. Our subject comes into the light of self -evidencing truth 
only as we approach it on the larger scale. One reason, a 
main reason I think, why men's endeavor to believe in immor- 
tality is beset by confusion and conjecture, is that they are 
looking for the wrong thing, a thing that even if it exists is 
not scientifically worthy to enlist a soul's supreme energies. 
It is a mercy, perhaps, that their eyes are holden until they 



8 THE LIFE INDEED 

are ready to see things commensurate with the dignity of their 
nature. 



I. THE SCALE HITHERTO PREVAILING 

To reahze how this is, let us take a look at the scale of in- 
quiry and estimate that has prevailed in men's minds hither- 
to, both in the secular and the biblical standard of view. 

^ 'Where wert thou, brother, those four days?" is the ques- 
tion which the nineteenth century Laureate, acting spokesman 
of a whole curious humanity, puts to Lazarus of Bethany, that 
excepted mortal who, by scripture account, having passed the 
gates of death and well on into the region of corruption beyond, 
came back to resume this bodily existence. A question emi- 
nently natural, and on the scale of ideas hitherto prevailing, 
most momentous. The poet who phrased it is half resentful 
at Lazarus, or his historian, for leaving the answer unrecorded; 
such answer would, he thinks, so laudably crown our hard-won 
discoveries in the mysteries of being, by telling what it is to 
die. 

What it is to die, and its correlate, v/hat it is to survive 
death, — in this strain of inquiry it is that the world's search 
for immortality centres. It is the kind of speculation and con- 
jecture that rises first out of the phenomena we see, and that 
takes most immediate hold of actual fact. If only this were 
known, if only v/e could push exploration four days, or one 
hour, beyond the last lapsing breath, what an assured basis 
we should have, it would seem, for all the rest. At this point 
it is that knowledge ceases; and at this point, it is reasonable 
to assume, the broken thread should be joined again. In the 
quest for evidence of survival, what procedure so obviously 
fitting as to set up our exploring apparatus at the place where 
the clue was lost? And with such presupposition it is not un- 
reasonable to suppose that the Bible, if its claim to revelation 
is authentic, if indeed it would save itself from discredit by 
dealing with visible facts instead of religous fancies, should 
on this matter preeminently be luminous and outspoken. 



ON THE LARGER SCALE 9 

Yet here the Bible is as silent and apparently as helpless as 
is our baffled experience itself. To the inquiry rising so spon- 
taneously out of this miracle at Bethany no word of reply is 
vouchsafed. 

Behold a man raised up by Christ! 

The rest remaineth unreveal'd; 

He told it not; or something seal'd 
The lips of that Evangelist. 

Nor does the Bible elsewhere tell us, with any authoritative 
or realistic clearness, what it is to die. Such information may 
have been left to biological science, which would seem to have 
legitimate charge of such things ; at any rate, it does not seem 
to belong to the distinctive range of scripture disclosure. In 
its large trend the Bible virtually ignores the tomb ; and herein 
it is in great contrast to other so-called sacred books. It is 
in no sense a rival, for instance, of that portentous Egyptian 
Book of the Dead, which in its day wrought to transform a 
nation's religion into a huge funeral service, and made a 
whole country-side one vast mausoleum. Brought to confront 
the mystery of man's exit from this material life, it merely has 
at command the language that human tongues have moulded 
for it, no more. The dust returns to earth as it was; the 
spirit to God who gave it. That is its terse summary of things, 
and that is ours. No voice from heaven is needed to tell us 
that; nor is there prophetic demonstration or oracle to tell us 
more. 

Before we jump to the conclusion, hov/ever, that we have 
here uncovered a lame spot in divine revelation, or take up 
with the prevailing scientific contempt for the scriptural view 
of things, it may be worth while to ask if this silence itself may 
not have a meaning. There are cases wherein an omission, 
by the very conspicuousness of the absence it creates, is elo- 
quent as an argumentum e silentio. And this, I think, is the 
plain state of the case here. The Bible makes so little of 
physical death and its sequel, in spite of men's age-long bond- 
age from fear of death, not because it has met a mystery 
too hard for it, but because on its scale of disclosure these are 



lo THE LIFE INDEED 

of too little consequence to pay the revealing. All that needs 
to be known of them can be left to common observation, or to 
a lower department of science. Its business is with matters of 
real moment for life. It teaches how to live rather than how 
to die. In pursuance of this object its range of conceptions 
shapes itself into a spacious map of being in which, when all 
vital elements are reckoned, death is seen as a mere incident, 
nay rather as actually abolished; in which therefore the doubt- 
ful and troubled interrogation of death, as if this were of any 
essential account in the large destiny of man, is needless and 
supererogatory. 

Here at the outset of our study, then, we note a difference 
amounting to contrast, between the world's prevailing sense 
of unseen values and the Bible's. On the one side the event of 
physical death bulks relatively so large in the sum of being 
that the answer to the question what region it opens, if any, 
seems the indispensable step to the discovery of immortality. 
On the other side, that same event counts for so little that the 
question seems never to have occurred at all. It is evidently 
regarded as of no essential significance whatever where Laz- 
arus was those four days. A disparity of estimate this, very 
important to note and weigh. Views so contradictory cannot 
both, it would seem, be valid. We are concerned to know 
which is right, and especially which is more worthy of our 
manhood and of the true dignity of being. 

Without dwelling longer on this contrast, however, a few 
minutes' attention is due, before we enter on the scripture con- 
ception, to the involvements of the estimate of things hitherto 
prevailing, which is trying, so to say, to get a survey of eternal 
life by peeping beyond the gates of physical death. 

We may have discredited spiritualism and occultism; may 
be wholly skeptical of anything authentic coming from psy- 
chical research; and as a matter of fact there is, and seems 
always likely to be, as much doubt as belief concerning these 
things. The difficulties are so enormous, the chances of fraud 
and self-deception are such a constant besetment, that the 
instinct of straightforward minds is strongly against the whole 



ON THE LARGER SCALE ii 

uncanny matter. Those who would treat it scientifically, in 
order to see what there is or is not in it, have to work against 
great odds of sentiment. All the same, men's thoughts of the 
unseen future are in general keyed to that scale. If it could 
be proved that spiritualism and psychic research achieve au- 
thentic results, men would be ready to accept them, and for 
the most part men are not ready to look for a solution in 
any other way. This is natural, perhaps; I am not blaming 
them. I am not saying that something may not in time come 
of it; or even that the eventual result of the present study 
may not, on its larger scale, leave us in much the same atti- 
tude. On any quest for immortality, however, conducted by 
mere scientific observation we are committed, of necessity, to 
what may be called a peep-hole revelation. No device of 
physics, no apparatus of biology, has a lens large enough or 
fine enough for more. By a natural assumption souls that 
have passed beyond death are supposedly somewhere in the 
universe now; somewhere, and in some questionable shape, 
their once awaited future has become an eternal present. 
What so reasonable, if this is so, as to try to find them and 
observe how they fare? This is the tacit idea which not only 
every spiritualist, but every one who has the spiritualist's 
calibre, carries about with him. Browning's Mr. Sludge the 
Medium, fraud though he is, can presuppose so much in his 
accuser : 

Go back to the beginning, — the first fact 

We're taught is, there's a world beside this world, 

With spirits, not mankind, for tenantry; 

That much within that world once sojourned here, 

That all upon this world will visit there, 

And therefore that we, bodily here below. 

Must have exactly such an interest 

In learning what may be the ways o' the world 

Above us, as the disembodied folk 

Have (by all analogic likelihood) 

In watching how things go in the old home 

With us, their sons, successors, and what not. 

Oh, yes, with added powers probably. 

Fit for the novel state, — old loves grown pure. 

Old interests understood aright, — they watch! 



12 THE LIFE INDEED 

Eyes to see, ears to hear, and hands to help, 
Proportionate to advancement: they're ahead, 
That's all — do what we do, but noblier done. 

A natural enough conception, to be sure; though of course 
all this must needs be, on the scale of estimate it connotes, an 
external, prying, spectacular affair. It is as if the dead had 
been transferred to a mysterious museum or aquarium, and 
we who are left could observe them only as uncouth figures 
moving vaguely about in an element which, though we should 
win to the sight of it, could yield nothing of its essential na- 
ture, its real inwardness. It is very little, after all, that we 
could get, if we got the utmost we seek. 

Then there is the whole sorry business of opening communi- 
cation with the dead. I must not go into this at all; I could 
not without having to go too far. Call it by the most dignified 
name you can, call it science, call it psychic research, call it 
theosophy; and what is the real purport of it? I have no 
desire to belittle it, any further than it belittles itself; I wish 
merely, as the phrase is, to size it up. And this we may grate- 
fully say of psychism : if it has not revealed anything authentic 
or illuminating about the dead, it is in the way of revealing 
something about the living; of exploring many secrets of our 
abysmal personality, many strange mysteries of our subcon- 
scious selves. It forces us back after all, you see, upon the 
study of life; it cannot help this in the long run. To believe 
in immortality is one thing, as Stevenson has already told us, 
but it is first needful to believe in life. 

What stratum of life, then, shall we address ourselves to, 
that we may believe in a life immortal; what plane or table- 
land of life pays the best returns? The question is an end- 
lessly vital one. And the answer is precisely the answer of 
the Earth Spirit to Faust: 

Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst, 
Nicht mh*! 

thou art like the spirit whom thou comprehendest, not like me. 
If your comprehension, your grasp of life is large, a like large- 
ness crowns your quest; if small and petty, you fall just so 



ON THE LARGER SCALE 13 

much below the possibilities of the open secret. Not the mys- 
tery of being is to blame, but your self-imposed limitation. 
What spirit of life, then, what reach and principle of being, 
does it behoove us, if we may, to comprehend? This is our 
crucial question. 

In business of psychic research there are things curiously 
parallel to what obtains in other branches of science; the gen- 
eral method, in fact, has not changed at all. We use a tele- 
scope to look at the stars; we use a microscope to look at the 
tissues, the throbbing protoplasmic elements of animal life; 
and we are at the end of our quest when we have discovered, 
on the one hand, the courses of planets and stars and suns, 
on the other the motions of minute organic cells which we can 
contemplate only from outside, and which have as little realiz- 
able meaning as has the glass through which we are gazing. 
In psychic research, too, the procedure is essentially the same; 
only, as the question concerns the survival of personality, the 
lens that we use is a personal one which we call a medium; 
and we try to make this lens as achromatic as possible by di- 
vesting it of all moral character, or rather immoral, like fraud 
and mercenary motives, and of all spiritual character, by 
putting it into a hypnotic trance wherein it lies wholly passive 
to extrinsic suggestion. As the result of our experiment we 
get back some of our own personality, some of the medium's, 
and — and — well, is any of the equivocal residuum left over 
a veritable arrival from spirit-land? It is exceedingly hard 
to determine; almost impossible to identify and prove au- 
thentic. Some doctors say no, some yes ; both very dubiously. 
And what does the thing amount to after we have got it? If 
it brings any report from a surviving spirit, it seems to bring 
— I judge from the kind of message elicited — only some 
trivial shreds of personality, dregs squeezed' out as it were 
from the subconscious self, as freakish as dreams, as inane 
as a weather report; and no character, nothing large and up- 
lifting at all. No wonder this, is it? For it was not character 
that set up the search; we did not bring our essential manhood 
to the quest, but only our curious brain, and that passive lens 



14 ; THE LIFE INDEED 

which we employed as medium. And it was not character that 
was sought; we did not address ourselves to that fibre of the 
spiritual personality which in any worth or dignity of character 
could repay our outlay of experiment. We were interrogating 
merely the bare fact of existence and survival, not the con- 
tents. Perhaps, after all, we obtained as much as we brought 
with us, or as we had really at heart. There is no objection, 
intrinsically, to our getting proof of the departed soul's actual 
existence if we can; no more objection than to getting proof 
that the planet Mars is inhabited, if we can. 

But what we are concerned with here, is the scale of things, 
the scale of ideal and spiritual measurement, that all this con- 
notes. Water cannot rise higher than its source; neither can 
human personality. Of the human destiny that we are setting 
out to consider we may, with the scientists, freely concede the 
same thing : it cannot be assumed to rise higher than the power 
and promise embodied in it at the source. But it can rise as 
high as this. It ought, if it was well planned and not bungled 
and thwarted, to rise as high. Have we then reckoned our 
source high enough? Is the scale of measurement hitherto 
prevailing large enough, worthy enough, self-justifying enough, 
to answer to the creative word of Him who when He brought 
all things, with their store of possibilities, into being, called 
them one and all very good? 

A valid measurement of things, as we know, starts with the 
choice of a unit of measure, — feet, or miles, or pounds, or 
dollars. Now the unit with which the prevailing estimate of 
immortal personality starts is the universal fact of physical 
death: it takes note of the phenomenon that looms up most 
inexorable before us and that the world has mourned and 
feared since the beginning without being able to mitigate or 
avert. It sees that there is no discrimination; that the unit 
is as accurate and absolute as that by which we calculate the 
diameter of the earth; that the sage and the fool, the holy and 
the profane, the child and the idiot, the criminal and the sui- 
cide, all come to death alike, however ripe or untimely the 
event may be. And it is all held to connote one thing: that 



ON THE LARGER SCALE 15 

somehow this human nature, so fearfully and wonderfully 
made, is thereby laid in ruins. The unit, if we may so say, 
is a unit of dissolution and destruction; and the problem of 
possible immortality reduces to the problem of discovering 
some sort of survival, some pieces of the wreck, some flotsam 
and jetsam, however meagre, rescued from the ravage of death. 
From the material point of view a hard, nay, an insoluble 
problem. For when the catastrophe is over, the body is all 
there still, left on earth, its elements still weighable and chemi- 
cally analyzable, all accounted for; and we have kid away in 
earth all the organs of seeing and hearing and handling and 
thinking, every one. There is no clear sign that some finer 
breath, some naked essence survives, no more reason on this 
scale of insight, for supposing that an emanation of the brain 
goes on to a new life, than for supposing that an emanation of 
the leg does. We might as well own the fact. We cannot by 
material science follow up the separation of body and soul. 
We say popularly that soul and body are two things, and that 
they are dissociated at death; but for the rest we have but 
faith. We cannot know — on this scale I mean — even that 
body and soul are two; all we can see is the body, which for 
years has been diseased and decaying, and finally lapses back 
to its elements before our eyes. Then if by faith — or con- 
jecture — we try to trace the history of this so-called surviving 
soul, all we can image is a part of the man, a piece of him, 
going on, and that the part that some deem of least value; and 
so, being only a part, it must needs lead a maimed and crippled 
existence somewhere, getting on the best it can without organs 
of sense and activity. 

This is not a caricatured description; it was the sad idea of 
the whole world, Hebrew, Greek, Egyptian alike, before Christ 
came: it is the idea of millions now. It underlay the imagin- 
ings of Sheol and Hades; nor has modern science done any- 
thing to mitigate it, except in the direction of annihilation. 
And the best it can certainly affirm of the other state of exist- 
ence is, that when the soul was separated from the body it 
was set free from its pains and diseases, its toils and hardships 



i6 THE LIFE INDEED 

too, and at all events is now at rest. To be sure, worthier 
fancies have not been lacking. The soul has been imagined to 
be somehow wiser elsewhere than here, and to be able to see 
into things that were enigmas on earth; and men have put 
questions to it by necromancy and tried to get light from it on 
earthly affairs. But these notions were fancies, conjectures; 
they did not grow as fruitage from a deep-sown seed of vital 
energy, or rest on a basis of living motive and principle. 

All this natural enough, perhaps, but it betokens a sorry, 
petty, puny scale of things, as compared with the scale to 
which the Bible conceptions are conformed. It is making 
death and the survival of death, not life and the ennobling of 
life, the unit of measure; it is making the effort of man cul- 
minate in rescuing a piece of himself from the ruins of nature ; 
it is making the life beyond a virtual prolongation of the life 
here, with its material and sensual ideals transplanted into a 
conjectured new environment, which however, so far as inner 
standards of living are concerned, is a projection of the same 
old plane. To interrogate that life beyond by mediumship 
is of a piece with all the rest. Without condemning it as evil, 
we must say it is low, it is small, it is petty; the fault is in its 
scale and its unit of measure. The healthy instinct of Scrip- 
ture, as we know, is strongly against such consulting of the 
dead. Even in the dim Old Testament days men were guided, 
whether by Providence or by the disdain engendered of a 
higher spiritual ideal, away from the necromancy that in- 
fested all around the Hebrew people. We recall Isaiah's in- 
dignant words: ''And when they shall say unto you. Seek unto 
them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, 
and that mutter: should not a people seek unto their God? 
for the living to the dead? To the law and to the testimony: 
if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is 
no light in them." That is it. The scale ought to be the 
scale of life, not of death; of life as guided by God and His 
recognized will; without this scale of measurement there is no 
light in them. It is only along this line that life and immor- 
tality, in the only sense worthy of the large possibilities of 
manhood, can come to light. 



ON THE LARGER SCALE 17 

I have spoken of the scale hitherto prevailing in secular and 
scientific matters. But the prevailing religious and doctrinal 
scale, likewise, is too small; measured by too confined and 
partial data; true as far as it goes, doubtless, but needing that 
juster determination of emphasis which comes of enlargement. 
For it too is founded on the unit of ruin and rescue, of a fall 
of man and eventual redemption from it, of a humanity de- 
based by a primal sin which only a world miracle can heal, 
and of an elaborate plan for curing it so that finally, here or 
beyond the grave, man may be a whole man, ready to do man's 
work and fulfill man's functions. Meanwhile the promise and 
prophecy that has persisted at the roots of his nature in spite 
of that original ruin, the positive, so to say, which has more 
than offset the negative, has received too meagre recognition; 
the stumbling-stone of sin has blocked the way. In other 
words, the ideal hitherto has been mainly an ideal of mending 
and cobbling, getting men into a kind of patched-up order to 
die and render account. The questions about immortality 
have mostly been conformed to this standard: questions 
whether at death the redemption, in the individual case, is 
going to prove valid enough after all to pull the man over the 
line into heaven; questions of so-called conditional immor- 
tality, — what are the conditions, and how Christ comes in for 
those who never heard of him; questions of the chances of in- 
fants and idiots and suicides; questions of what is called pro- 
bation after death for those who have not had a fair show here. 
All these specimen things are real problems; a most bewilder- 
ing tangle of problems, indeed, on the scale of things in which 
our churches and systems of theology have hitherto been work- 
ing. I am not going to try any detailed answer of them. I 
leave them to the churches and the great evangelizing move- 
ments of the Christian world. I think I do not court contra- 
diction, however, in saying that, legitimate questions though 
they be, and in their place crucial, there is the note of small- 
ness about them all; they lack somehow the element essential 
to make the answer to them self-authenticating. They need 
supplementation by the realization of another and larger scale 



1 8 THE LIFE INDEED 

of things. It may be that man is a ruined being, who needs 
mending and cobbler work to get him into repair. It may be 
that a struggle to regain lost ground is the first thing in order. 
But ought this idea of him to usurp the whole field? Should 
it go unexamined and untested, as containing the whole mean- 
ing of manhood life? 

May we not rather let this retrieval idea rest here a little, 
in the good keeping of the churches, while we contemplate 
what man is as well created, what he is in good repair and 
fulness of function, what he is as growing from infancy and 
childhood to maturity of powers and ideals, — that is, as a 
being in process of evolution, gradually sloughing off the old 
members and functions that become outworn and atrophied, 
gradually coming into his full heritage of adult manhood, and 
when that summit of rounded and finished organism is gained, 
like Job with his life's record on his shoulder, facing the un- 
seen? Surely it is no unsafe procedure thus to strike out a 
little from the stereotyped order of inquiry. 

To contemplate manhood so calls for the adoption of a 
new scale of values, a new field of investigation, a new kind 
of apparatus; new and immensely larger. Our imagination 
must take on cosmic and universal proportions. We have seen 
things dimly and dubiously so long that we are on the verge 
of concluding there is nothing to see. But before we so con- 
clude, let us pause to ask if this dimness may not have been 
because we had not developed eyes to see, or because, with 
eyes only partly opened, we saw men as trees walking. It is 
just on this simple line of seeing, of evolving organs to compre- 
hend what has always existed, that our scripture text-book 
represents immortality as being brought to light; and the light 
into which it at last emerges clear and self-evidencing, is just 
the crystalline radiance that beams forth from the life itself, 
the Life Indeed. This is the summit of the scale. 

And this is as we would have it, as our deepest instinct tells 
us it must needs be. We cannot trust a truth of such tremen- 
dous import to the precarious bolstering of logical or scientific 
proof, which it takes only the next wave of thought to unsettle 



ON THE LARGER SCALE 19 

again. It must be its own evidence, standing out strong above 
all our petty scaffolding. On the scale to which we have hither- 
to been committed we can only gyrate round in circles of alter- 
nate gleam and eclipse; and that, we may be sure, is not God's 
way of proving the truths of life. 

II. ENLARGEMENT DEMANDED BY 
EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE 

To say this is by no means to discredit science, nor to warn 
it off the field. It is merely demanding that science rise to 
its occasion. And indeed science is nobly responding. It, no 
less truly than Scripture, is demanding an enlargement of the 
scale of vital values; timidly perhaps as yet, and half afraid 
of the vision that is opening before it; but surely, as soon as 
it leaves its microscope long enough to think, finding itself 
launched on a more spacious ocean of being, which sooner or 
later it must needs navigate. For within the past few years, 
within the easy memory of men not yet aged, science has 
named a magic word, the word evolution; and that word has 
laid down a new unit for all its measurements. The conception 
of evolution has transformed every view of the world. In 
these few years it has become a necessity, almost a tyranny, in 
all our estimates of things; if we do not accept its material 
conclusions about species and interrelations of being, we can- 
not help thinking in its terms. 

This instinct of the evolutionary is shown very significantly 
by science itself, in the attitude it takes toward psychic re- 
search; which, as we know, has had hard ado to get adopted 
into the scientific family at all, and even now holds such place 
only by sufferance, as if it occupied at best only a kind of 
scientific borderland. I speak of this branch of research 
merely as it is confessedly looking beyond the bourn of death; 
when it confines itself to the arcana of personality this side 
of the veil its legitimation is more freely conceded. Why this 
strange instinct against it? we ask; and can only answer, be- 
cause such psychic research is felt to be not in the true evolu- 



20 THE LIFE INDEED 

tionary idiom. By trying, as it does, to look through a 
mediumistic lens and see what the dead are doing nov/, to get 
a sort of back-stairs entrance among the spirits, it is merely 
projecting the ideal of life onward along the same old material 
plane. It has, so far forth, no eyes for a larger development 
of being; it represents, in short, an evolution that does not 
evolve. A peep-hole revelation, I was profane enough a little 
while ago to call this sort of thing. George Eliot, who as we 
know was a strenuous votary of modern science, was more 
caustic still; she called it ''a rat-hole revelation." Now by this 
healthy antipathy psychic research is not accused of being 
false, or even unscientific: it is merely felt to be floundering 
still in the obsolete presuppositions of science, when men were 
doing nothing but observing, sticking pins in butterflies and 
making endless collections, while the end of which these pre- 
liminaries were but means already looms up far beyond. It 
is a belated type of exploration; what the slangsters call a 
back-number. And therefore, while it may still gather much 
on this material and psychological plane, as regards the life 
beyond it is bound to be barren. The vast concept of evolu- 
tion has put it out of court. 

Now evolution, if it is a permanent fact and not temporary, 
has got to go on past the physical death of man. We cannot 
stop its majestic wheels; cannot think it down to the paltry 
thing it would be if we put its full-stop there. Consider the 
case. The highest product of biological evolution, as all con- 
cede, is man ; the highest that there is room for in this material 
world. ^The beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!" 
is how Shakespeare describes him. On earth, as John Fiske 
said, there will never be a higher being than man; there will 
never be a higher life than manhood life. The huge tide of 
evolutionary vitality, which began away back with the throb 
of unicellular protoplasm, which swept upward through plants 
and jelly-like things, through rudimental organs and functions, 
through countless lower animal stages, reaches its climax, its 
utmost, in that paragon of animals, man. Then it sojourns 
with man awhile, until he gets started a little on his education, 



ON THE LARGER SCALE 21 

and it adds an intellectual element unknown before, the growth 
of self-conscious mind, and with this the growth of arts, and 
social relations, and institutions, wonderful things all. Yet 
all this while man continues as frail as any creature below 
him, and even more subject to infirmities of the flesh; for all 
his brain achievements do not seem to have mended evolution 
in this regard. And then, at a wholly incalculable moment, 
comes death, and so far as we can see ends it all. Reflect that 
this is the extinction of the highest being yet evolved; that at 
this moment the vital motion which began so far back and so 
far down fades out of the tissues, and these revert to inorganic 
dust. What an elemental injustice seems to be in such ending, 
and yet how easy. It is not hard to make a man die, as we 
should expect it would be if death were so momentous a catas- 
trophe. A breath of air, a drop of water suffices, as Pascal 
says, to kill him; nay, men themselves treat death as a trivial 
thing, rushing impetuously upon it in battles and massacres 
and foolhardy risks. Is this then the finality, the end of the 
play? If so, then evolution is a paltry thing, false and hypo- 
critical; the vast animal world is a botch and bungle; the 
forces of a universe, with their myriad motions of growth and 
heredity and development, have been desperately laboring to 
pick up and lay down a straw. 

No; it is unthinkable. An evolution which has proved itself 
capable of rolling up such a mighty product must still be in 
full tide, must still go on, beyond our sight and sense, beyond 
what our brain has shaped in thought, beyond both matter and 
mind. We cannot put so tremendous a stoppage of the order 
of things at the moment of man's bodily death. If we could, 
the power to stay an infinite creative course would be within 
the compass of puny man, and of the base in man, as soon as 
he could get his torpedo boats and machine guns deadly 
enough. No; we cannot think any end to that majestic current 
of which we, willing or unwilling, are a part, any more than 
we can think a bound to space or an end to time; we are in 
it and swept along by it. We have some faint extrinsic notion 
of its source among the eternal hills; we have a still vaguer 



22 THE LIFE INDEED 

notion of the ocean to which we are bound; but one thing our 
magic idea of evolution will not let us accept, namely, that it 
is an ocean of death. 

But if evolution goes on, how shall it go on? It has done 
part of its work, and done it well. We are filled with awe and 
wonder at the infinite plan displayed in it. But its bodily po- 
tencies are exhausted in this life and in man; this we know, 
not because man must die, but because with his larger needs 
man must go on beyond the point where bodily powers fail, 
must supplement his eye by spectacles and his hand by cun- 
ningly devised machinery. We know it too because these 
potencies return eventually on themselves; they are not aug- 
mented by heredity; the next generation has it all to do over 
again, going through the endless circle of birth, maturing, and 
decay. Does then the intellect, which invented such clever 
tools and made such conquests of thought, give signs of greater 
promise? Has it through the evolutionary millenniums grown 
so large that it must have a new world to fit it? Well, that is 
not so clear. It is not clear, looking over a long tract of years 
during which knowledge has been increased, that we are very 
far in advance of the mind of Plato. Besides, too, the mind 
is at the mercy of the body, yielding to its diseases and casu- 
alties ; and so at the mercy of environment, yielding to the ex- 
actions of age and race and climate and custom. Like the body 
also it seems to return on itself and move in a self-completing 
circle, from childhood to second childhood. Here then is the 
situation: the world tide of evolution on the one side, which 
must go on; universal death on the other, which must exact 
its due. It is much like the old problem which we used 
to laugh over as children: if an irresistible body meets an 
immovable obstacle, what ensues? It looks as if the im- 
possible had become the actual; it is so, whether it can be so 
or not. 

Well, we might as well laugh over it as cry; and oddly 
enough that other old pleasantry comes to mind here, ''If you 
are between the devil and the deep sea, there is nothing for it 
but to take to the woods." In other words, we must needs 



ON THE LARGER SCALE 23 

betake ourselves to what the lawyers call a change of venue; 
or as we are maintaining here, our science demands an enlarge- 
ment of scale, whereon evolution shall call into play powers 
hitherto unexercised and unreckoned with. Otherwise, for 
the great future we are still committed to mending and cobbler 
work, to extricating the broken and twisted fragments from 
the ruins of nature and getting them into some sort of repair 
for a new lease of more or less crippled survival. And this, 
in itself, is as unthinkable as the rest. We must have a change 
of venue; must find some vital principle still more august, 
something which never yielded to decay and deterioration at 
all, but was in full vigor still and growing when untimely 
death supervened. In other words, we must seek a principle 
whose evolutionary potency is just beginning or ready to begin, 
when other powers yield to failure. If such a principle could 
be found, it might not only bear the essential being onward be- 
yond death, but who knows? it might conceivably redeem all 
the rest, furnishing them the needed vehicle for renewed life, 
and so do the repair work which is so evidently needed; doing 
it so well that all the cobblings and solderings should be swal- 
lowed up in the larger glory and strength. A tremendous 
dream this; but does not the authentic involvement of con- 
tinued evolution demand it? Can it accept less? 

All this is but another way of saying what John Fiske and 
others have already said, that from this point onward, from 
the point where our lenses and calculating apparatus fail, 
himian evolution must be spiritual. Manhood must rise to a 
higher order and standard of being; its immortality absolutely 
depends on it. Form, habitat, and laws of that larger being 
are inconceivable except as coordinated with the life of the 
spirit. 

It is no presumption against the reality of this uprise that 
we cannot trace it, or cannot on our present scale of biological 
values even comprehend it. To make room for it and hold it 
true is only following out the observable order of nature. The 
course of development that has brought us hither is full of 
such strange epochs, where all at once a new and broader world 



24 THE LIFE INDEED 

of being opens above, and there flows into it an order of life 
absolutely inconceivable to the consciousness of the stage be- 
low; as inconceivable as is a fourth dimension to us who are 
so sure that length, breadth, and thickness take up all the 
space of the universe. Professor Shaler speaks of ''many, 
very many, instances in which the apparently uniform proc- 
esses of Nature, those which are indeed uniform in their steps 
of action, lead to sudden -and complete changes of result." 
We can all see how true this is. Water in the fluid state, for 
instance, if it were endowed with consciousness, could not con- 
ceive of itself as a solid, as ice; could not conceive of itself as 
a gas, as steam; yet these exist under their conditions, with 
wholly new properties, and it takes nothing, apparently, but a 
slight change of temperature to make the difference. A plant 
has the same chemical elements in it, and the same make-up 
of vital cells, as an animal; yet it is absolutely shut out, except 
as food and shade, from the animal world above it. An animal 
has the same protoplasmic tissues, the same endowment of 
senses, as a man; returns to dust in the selfsame way; as 
Ecclesiastes says, "one breath have they both." We can 
enter into its life, of sense and instinct; yet the life of our 
higher world, with its thoughts and ideals, nay with the very 
use we can make of senses and instincts, is utterly inconceiv- 
able to its plane of being. Where and when does the animal 
evolve into the man, biologists are inquiring ; yet at some mys- 
terious rapids in the current of being great Nature made the 
transformation; and now by the side of the dog exists another 
animal, his master, who is more than animal, and the dog can 
only worship and love him, but not understand. Just so we 
are looking up from beneath to some inconceivable higher 
stage of being; and men are feeling the need of it and clamor 
for it. For in one respect our analogy of plants and animals 
does not hold; the next stage beyond us is not all inconceivable. 
The far-off dawn of it began to stir the East as soon as man 
launched out from his animal nature to explore new tracts of 
being. And now in these latest days a philosopher, Nietzsche, 
whose untempered vision drove him crazy, and a playwright, 



ON THE LARGER SCALE 25 

Bernard Shaw, whose sense of the world's crookedness has 
involved him in a tangle of paradox, are calling for a Super- 
man to help us out of our slough, a man who they think, in 
perverse ignoring of what has long been revealed, is not yet 
born. And their philosophic ideal is essentially the one to 
which our new scientific law is forcing us. It maintains, as 
sound thinking must needs maintain, that manhood evolution, 
in order to break its deadlock and go on at all, must hence- 
forth be spiritual. 

Of this contemplated spiritual stage of evolution, whatever 
that may involve, I have occasion here for only two remarks; 
but these are weighty for their bearing on our whole 
inquiry. 

The first is, that this ought to be, as the scientific termi- 
nology expresses it, not catastrophic, that is, not coming in by 
miracle or some supramundane irruption from without, but 
truly evolutionary, that is, rising naturally out of powers and 
capacities already existing within our human nature. In this 
stipulation we may freely concede all that the higher biology 
demands. We of the churches have reproached scientists for 
their fight against miracles and the supernatural; have called 
them skeptics and thought of them as wicked. Well, this is 
the meaning of their skepticism: they are not perverse, not 
vicious, not undevout; but they want a life beyond of which 
we as human beings so marvelously made can avail ourselves 
without belying the laws of thought and imagination which 
are already in us. They want to play their part in life and 
bring the solution of the plot without the arbitrary agency of 
a deus ex machina. Perhaps they are wrong; perhaps they 
are excluding from their scheme an element of the evolution 
which, being unseen, is none the less real for not betraying its 
divinity. But if they, with their loyalty to reason, are wrong, 
we need not fear to make common cause and be wrong with 
them. Perhaps it is a question of names after all. What they 
do not want is the God and the miracles which the narrower 
and dimmer ages, the ages of the smaller scale, have imagined; 
and perhaps when they see the real power as it is, working 



26 THE LIFE INDEED 

though it does by traceable evolutionary methods, they will 
name it God and most eagerly concede its supernatural char- 
acter. We must all live and learn. And just as Adam in his 
more primitive world had to name the creatures that were 
brought to him, so as our world gets more majestic we have 
gradually to recognize and acknowledge the spiritual powers 
that we have for pattern and company. Meanwhile let us not 
shun to take the scientists on their own stipulated ground. Let 
the life that we set out to explore, with all its strange events, 
be seen as a life not catastrophic but evolutionary. Let its 
energies and achievements be seen as genuinely human and 
available for man as man. And not supernatural too, not di- 
vine? Well, that depends on how these connect with the deeper 
realities of the world. It will not pay to be intolerant and 
exclusive here either; and if we discover of the soul of man, 
as did the poet, that 

Ere she gain her Heavenly-best, a God must mingle with the game, 

we need not put the possibility frowardly away from us. The 
discovery may be great enough to warrant it; and if so, surely 
we have no call to withhold its true name. 

The second remark is, that on the larger scale of vital values 
demanded by evolutionary science we need to take fitting note 
not merely of the fact of continued life but of its nature. The 
unit of the ideal is not really the immortality of the soul, in the 
paltry sense that Greek philosophy and modern dualism have 
given it, the sense, that is, of soul separated from and sur- 
viving body. As guided by the evolution idea, indeed, it does 
not even stop to inquire whether man has a soul, conceived I 
mean as an appendage to body and brain, and separable in 
such a way as to leave a piece of the man behind while another 
part floats away as a conjectured naked essence. All this is 
still in the dubious idiom of the smaller scale. Of course 
death, what Dr. Smyth calls the place of death in evolution, 
has to be reckoned with; but the man who is evolved into the 
hereafter is the whole man, moving all together if he move at 
all. Begin to subtract from man as you see him here in the 



ON THE LARGER SCALE 27 

body, in order to leave a residuum that may survive, and you 
cannot stop until you have annihilated the man. In other 
words, it is not survival but — amazing as it may seem — 
resurrection, avd(j7aai<; , the rising to a higher life, to a high 
law and range of being, that, as veritable fact, evolution is 
forcing us to. This is what makes the matter, on the biological 
scale, so inconceivable: we are confronting a stage of being as 
much higher and completer than this as the human is above 
the animal, with all the values of the present stage intact yet 
sweeping onward in new conditions and dimensions. There 
is no name for this but uprise, resurrection. 

Let us disentangle this idea from its non-essentials. Resur- 
rection, — does not this connote death, as if one must needs 
die in order to rise? Well, that is as it may be. The fact that 
physical death is universal is not to be taken as meaning that 
physical death is a necessary prerequisite to resurrection. May 
not man rise from the maturity of nature as truly as from its 
ruins? Why should the spirit have to postpone its life until 
the body dies? It is the enlargement of being that counts, the 
uprise not from nature but from a certain form and organism 
of matter. Nor will it do here to complicate this idea with 
questions of the body and the flesh. These will come up for 
consideration at the due time. Meanwhile it is enough to 
grasp this truth: that our modern science, our idea that the 
way of created nature is evolution, is directed straight toward 
the issue of resurrection. In some sense most real and au- 
thentic this is the teleology of life. So we are brought to the 
point where without equivocation we may answer Professor 
Goldwin Smith's question, ^'Is there another life?" No, we 
may frankly say: this, with its potencies of enlargement, is 
all the life there is. But if he takes this as evasive and asks. 
Is there an immortality? Yes, we may confidently answer; 
for if there is continued evolution there is resurrection, and 
resurrection includes immortality as the greater includes the 
less. 



28 THE LIFE INDEED 

III. ENLARGEMENT AS MEASURED BY 
SCRIPTURE CONCEPTIONS 

That our manhood's evolution, whatever its unimagined 
goal, must henceforth follow the line of the spiritual ; — if this 
is the pass to which scientific thinking has brought us, we 
must own how natural it is to turn to the ancient records and 
ask what the Bible says about it. It is not wise to think scorn 
of an old book just because it is old and we are new; it is a 
cheap and childish attitude to take. And especially of this 
old book, it is like kicking away the ladder by which we have 
climbed. Here is a book that in quaint Hebrew phraseology 
records spiritual data from a very early period; no, not a 
book, a literature rather, written at various times while the 
phenomena of life were fresh and vital issues; written by a 
people who seemed to have been set apart for the purpose, who 
had the genius for spiritual exploration, just as the Greeks had 
the genius for art and philosophy, and as the Romans had the 
genius for organization and administration. It is to this Bible 
of the Hebrews that we most naturally betake ourselves, if 
we would have an authoritative text-book of the data and prin- 
ciples of spiritual evolution. Whether it will answer to our 
modern scheme of things, and especially whether in the large 
it will satisfy the scientific spirit that so conditions our present- 
day thinking, — well, that remains to be seen. 

But, as I have intimated, a great deal depends, nay, for 
our question, all depends, on the way we read the Bible. A 
new reading of it is certainly the first requisite. Consider the 
case. A great expansion of spiritual insight and foresight is 
in this age coming upon our race ; science itself is contributing 
to it; the Bible as we have read it has laid its foundations and 
determined its approaches. Now spiritual insight, in its es- 
sential elements, is a thing timeless and universal ; it makes its 
way in the ages, not as does logical insight, fainting and doubt- 
ing under endless mistakes, but rather by trusting its deep in- 
stincts as far as they go, and wreaking its wealth of life upon 
them. Such has been the inner history of man, as Hebrew 



ON THE LARGER SCALE 29 

insight has traced it. To read the Bible, then, as our too 
arrogant science does, as if it were an obsolete lie, or a crude 
nation's vagaries, is to put it at the mercy of time and clime, 
to make it myopic, like science itself, and subject to the shifts 
of logic. But to read it as dogmatic theology and religiosity 
hitherto has done, does not greatly better the case. Our pur- 
view must be larger. The prophecy that we find in it must not 
be of private interpretation. We must estimate it by a larger 
scale of measurement; must project its histories and concep- 
tions against the background of a more spacious universe. 
If then it proves too small, or in any way invalid, let the fact 
appear. If on the other hand it is seen to have risen to the 
huge occasion, let us not miss the benefit of it. And mean- 
while, we can well afford to let some of the lesser questions of 
detail wait until their time comes, until they can be approached 
with the fitting presuppositions. We need not begin, for in- 
stance, by puttering with questions of a legislated and pre- 
carious immortality, questions of mending and cobbler work, 
of conditional immortality and future probation and general 
soul repairs. These will fall duly into place when the larger 
setting is seen as it is, — or else, what is more likely, be lost 
in light, like the spots on the sun. Nor, in truth, can they 
be brought to a luminous and self-evidencing solution on any 
smaller projection of things. In a word, the problem of im- 
mortality concerns manhood as a whole, not merely Christian 
or heathen manhood, and life as a vast world entity, not 
merely life as doctored up somehow, or as lived by a saint or 
philosopher. We have the Scripture's own word of its proph- 
ecy that this is not of private interpretation. The Bible, 
no less than science, demands to be taken on the cosmic and 
universal scale, the scale of eternity. To this scale it is that 
from the beginning its spiritual findings are adjusted. 

In this new reading of the Bible we must needs first of all 
determine our attitude toward the thing that has done most 
to give men pause: the assumption, namely, that it is an in- 
spired revelation from the ultimate Source of life, the Father 
of spirits. This is not a thing to asume, but, if true, to dis- 



30 THE LIFE INDEED 

cover. Every one must make the discovery for himself; no 
other can make it inwardly for him. And if we waive this 
assumption, we are set free from the doubts that inevitably 
go with it, doubts rising out of its literary origin, adequacy, 
transmission; our evidence is of quite another kind, and not 
at all at the mercy of such questions. If we still shrink from 
committing ourselves to the Bible, in nervous dread of miracles 
and the supernatural, if we quarrel with this element as if here 
we must put a preliminary negation, let us consider how truly 
in any case we must confront it and judge it not by names but 
by its intrinsic merits. We do not escape the supernatural by 
abjuring the Bible and taking to science. For science itself is 
forced to recognize one miracle, one absolutely transcendent, 
inexplicable thing. That is the advent of life itself. We know 
how helpless the most penetrative stretch of knowledge is be- 
fore this. With all the savant's pride of explaining the uni- 
verse, this, the initial fact of all, completely baffles him. Here 
are two specks of jelly-like matter, exactly alike in weight 
and size and chemical structure. One is inert, soggy, passive 
to decomposing forces from without; the other protoplasmic, 
throbbing with a mysterious energy called life, and in that 
smallest compass containing strange potencies of growth, or- 
ganism, inherited traits. What is the point of difference? 
What is this thing life, and whence? It is here, but no chemist 
or biologist can tell where it came from, how it got there, what 
is its relation to unseen forces. It is an unexplained wonder, 
which they can see only from the outside; and science must, 
to start with, assume this main miracle. Well, that is all we 
assume here, all that the Bible assumes. It puts the main 
miracle just where science must needs put it, and only there. 
Starting from that, it follows the continuous evolution that be- 
gins there; onward and upward to its culmination in an un- 
imagined destiny. On the larger scale which alone can compass 
the involvements of its record, it is the history of that man- 
hood evolution. 

But, it may be objected here, the Bible account toward the 
end makes another miracle supervene which science cannot 



ON THE LARGER SCALE 31 

receive so easily: the alleged resurrection of Christ. No; that 
is not another miracle. It is the other pole of the same, the 
consistent outcome of the life so begun, so evolved, as the 
Bible traces its elements. It is the same life raised to its 
highest power and entering upon its native heritage. This 
miracle, if miracle it be, the Bible views as essentially a man- 
hood thing; calls it the resurrection of the Son of man, of Him 
who as intrinsic man identified Himself with the life that it is 
in man to live, saying, ''I am the life." Passing wonderful 
this is, I grant it; but what otherwise is life itself, as soon as 
we apply to it the spiritual measure and potency? And with 
all its miraculous look, it merely gives concrete form to a 
mystery which science can as little evade as it can the inex- 
plicable beginning. It puts into individual expression the 
thing that comes of following life according to what science 
itself acknowledges must be its evolutionary destiny. 

The difference is, that while science, going back to the germ, 
tries to make life as small as it looks, the Bible boldly yet 
reverently makes it as large as it becomes. In the beginning 
it already sees the glory of the end. Evolution must needs 
have a starting-point; and men have groped and dredged for 
this, in the sea-slime and in the uncouth products of their 
laboratories, all in a blind guess-work, working at the idea 
of spontaneous generation. All friendly speed to them; we 
ought perhaps to test to the utmost what comes, or does not 
come, of making the beginning of life mechanical and ma- 
terial. The Bible, seeing to what spiritual heights life rises, 
makes its evolutionary starting-point spiritual. The very first 
event that startled the waste of chaos was, ''And the spirit of 
God was brooding upon the face of the waters"; brooding, like 
a mother-bird, as if it would warm the waste into life. So it 
is that it accounts for the main miracle, the entrance of life 
on our earth. In that event it sees stored up all the vital 
energies, all the potencies, that come to light in what follows. 

It is very important, I think, to keep in mind this scripture 
conception that if a God mingled with the game at all He was 
moving in it from the very beginning. There is no point in the 



32 THE LIFE INDEED 

tide of life where we can read Him out of the world, leaving 
it a mere weltering chaos; or even where we can put Him on 
a throne sitting somewhere outside of this mechanism which 
He has wound up, and seeing it go. That is to say, here in our 
Bible is contemplated an evolution of which the initial im- 
pulse, the determining principle, is not only spiritual but di- 
vine. It is here, as we see, that the gulf opens between the 
Bible and the present-day stage of natural science. Science, 
we may truly say, is fighting against a light. It insists on 
postulating nothing supernatural, that is, transcendent. It 
looks at those palpitating tissues and forbids us to find any- 
thing there but motion. The Bible comes boldly to the light, 
and postulates everything supernatural. Looking at those 
same tissues it sees moving there a Power that is all the while 
reaching in from a higher and deeper world. Every life, every 
act, every energy, is a spiritual thing, deriving from the un- 
seen. And if we ask which of these two, science or Bible, is on 
the truer tack, the only answer is, ^'By their fruits ye shall 
know them." Science is brought to the verge of a great abyss, 
which it must see is an abyss of life, which yet it will not own 
to be an abyss of light; while it is forced, without knowing 
what it says, to call for resurrection. Society, keyed to these 
self-limited conceptions of science, is in like manner beginning 
to call for a Superman. The Bible, seeing through ages and 
eons from the beginning, intrepidly postulates the potency of 
both, nay, writes the history of their advent. It looks, does 
it not? as if science must be the one to back down; it must 
do so, it would seem, in order rightly to explore its abyss of 
life. I do not mean that it must cease to be science, or even 
that it must die as science and rise again as religion. In ac- 
cepting more faith, it must exert not less but more reason. 
It must betake itself, however, to a more fitting apparatus of 
search, and thus become a truer science, more tolerant of its 
own vision, without dying at all; must rise to its mighty oc- 
casion, to the ideal of life that is knocking at its door. 

Ere she gain her Heavenly-best, a God must mingle with 
the game; the poet who wrote this was still thinking, as so 



ON THE LARGER SCALE 33 

many of us do, of some irruption of divinity farther along, 
some arbitrary interference, it may be, to stay the tendencies 
of ruin and set things right. The crookedness of the world has 
got on his nerves, so that he cannot clearly see how God can 
be in it now. God must supposably come in somehow for the 
finishing touches only, or perhaps to do mending and cobbler 
work. And indeed religion too has figured such an arbitrary 
irruption in its interpretation of the coming of Christ. Nor 
would we deny this side of Christ's work to the Bible con- 
ception. He came to seek and to save that which was lost; 
they called Him Jesus because He should save His people from 
their sins. What I wish to deny, however, is, that this was 
in any sense arbitrary, an irruption from without, a happy 
expedient, an afterthought. In other words, we need to realize 
that scripture conceptions, the broad cosmic truths which the 
Bible holds in solution, are working on a larger scale, a scale 
of majestic creation and evolution, and not merely a scale of 
repairing; a scale as large as the whole tract of time, and the 
whole order of the world, and the whole growth of man. We 
shall understand the coming of Christ better, I hope, and what 
it means, as we go on. Meanwhile, we must think of an an- 
cient world in which God could coexist with monsters of primi- 
tive form and creatures "that tare each other in their slime"; 
just as we have to think of a modern world in which, though 
God is felt as present bringing to pass some great work. He 
can coexist with city slums and boodle politics and Siberian 
transportations and Russian bomb-throwing. The game has 
become very complex, we must needs admit. A very compre- 
hensive conception that must be, which can compass the so- 
lution of all its moves. In tracing therefore the tremendous 
conceptions of a Book which so confidently says, "I see the 
end, and know the good," can we rightly narrow it to private 
interpretation? Nay, if it meets the huge case of manhood it 
must be read in broader light. 

I must not take occasion here even to sketch out the Bible 
description of this spiritual development, as from its starting- 
point it goes through many obscure stages, a dim and perilous 



34 THE LIFE INDEED 

way; first the natural, as St. Paul puts it, afterward the spiri- 
tual. Some notion of this is what we must try to get in the 
pages to come. 

One thing, however, must be noted of its far goal of resurrec- 
tion, that evolutionary culmination which eye hath not seen 
nor ear heard. That is, that this is not coordinated with the 
death of the body, as if all that a man had to do in order to 
rise were to do what he cannot help doing, namely, to die. We 
must dismiss this paltry notion; it belongs to the pettier scale 
of things. When the resurrection comes, as we shall see, man 
is vigorously cooperating with it, and contributing all that he 
is to it. In other words, the resurrection which the Bible con- 
templates, in the spirit and essence of it, begins not with death 
but with birth, what the Bible calls the birth of the spirit, the 
birth from above. That may take place here on earth, before 
we go to that mysterious realm on which physical death ushers 
us. The life and immortality send their heralds before, and 
come to light at a calculable point in history and in individual 
life ; so that when we enter the beyond we are already citizens 
of that country and have the larger light of it within us. This 
fact, as we see, furnishes a definite and quasi-historic field for 
our scientific study. We do not have to employ a medium, 
or wade the swamps of the hypnotic and subconscious; we do 
not have to leave this visible world; but all our tract of re- 
search lies in the wholesome light of day. Between the gloom 
of the nebulous and animal stage on the one hand and the 
light unapproachable on the other there is a penumbra, tem- 
pered to our earthly eyesight, which we may explore, and 
know that the elements we find there, being spiritual, are in 
truth the unseen elements, and are eternal. We can, with our 
sane endowments of sense and reason, follow the new reach 
of life beyond where resurrection begins, far enough to know 
what are its essential elements in any time, place, or state of 
being; we can, with the spirit that is in us, test it fully and 
taste its power. In short, there is put into our hands the true 
and only fitting apparatus of search: we learn to know the life 
beyond by actually living it. 



ON THE LARGER SCALE 35 

Such is a hint of the larger scale of values that is to condi- 
tion our reading of the Bible and evolutionary science; not to 
deny or discard the older readings, but to supplement them 
according to the idiom in which we have learned to read the 
world. Before I leave this introductory discussion, however, 
two remarks may be appended, about the study we are here 
opening. 

For one thing, I am not asking you, my reader, to take my 
word for it, as if I were making religious propaganda; am not 
even stipulating that you commit yourself to what the Bible 
is found to say. I am merely endeavoring to set forth what 
I have come to see is a vast cosmic history of life, hid between 
the covers of this book; and if my exposition of it introduces 
you to a new point of view, unthought of before, I am merely 
asking you to treat it as the Bereans treated a view of life 
new to them; who ''received the word with all readiness of 
mind, and searched the Scriptures daily, whether those things 
were so." The Bible does not need me nor any one else to 
defend it; it needs no championing against science or social 
arrangements; it needs only to be known and understood, in 
the spirit of it. So if there is fallacy or inadequacy in any 
view I bring you here, and you cannot lay it on me as inter- 
preter, lay it on the Bible. And if there is a great enlarge- 
ment and illumination of life here, and a self-evidencing truth 
of being, ascribe that to the Bible too, not at all to me. And 
as for receiving it as true, and lifting your faith up to 
its height, and living by it, — well, that is your affair. It will 
surely do no one harm. Personally, I am willing to accept a 
life so revealed; the Bible is to me still, in spite of all the 
monographs of science and philosophy, the real text-book of 
life. 

The other remark is this: we are embarked on the history 
of the coming of life and immortality to light. To what light? 
may be asked. To the light of man's intellect and insight and 
imagination and will. In other words, we see two things here 
confronting each other: the reality of being, and the mind of 
man. Our question is the question not merely of what is real, 



36 THE LIFE INDEED 

but of what is seen as real, as far and as fast as men have 
eyes to see. That is to say, we are embarked on a study of 
men's conceptions of things; of the great concept of life, con- 
tributed to by many minds, in many ages, yet somehow coales- 
cing into one unitary concept, which puts forth shoots from 
the soil of elemental manhood and blossoms and grows. Now 
this, as we see, raises us to a region above the choking dust 
of the prevailing historical and archeological criticism; if it 
comes to a date when the record was not clear, and so needed 
interpolation or later correcting, it has but to wait until the 
insight of man has grown a little larger, and the tangled lines 
are straightened out farther up. It does not choose its path 
low enough to stumble over an alleged fact because a later 
editor supplied it, or because it was written by some one who 
posed as St. John. It takes what the Gospel of John says as 
representing the conception of life, and of Christ's contribu- 
tion to it, which the human spirit was large enough to grasp 
when that gospel was written. So large a view of life, and of 
such tenor, was then in the bosom of manhood; it could then 
be given to the world and presumably understood by them; 
the generation or the century is a subordinate consideration. 
This is the reason why I have associated this broader reading, 
this enlargement of scale, not merely with scripture facts but 
with scripture conceptions. The history is an inner one, a 
history of the growth of the spirit of man, and of the increasing 
light that attended him all along the way. 



II 

THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 

HOW THE SOUL OF MANHOOD FARES IN MORTAL 
ENVIRONMENT AND RUDIMENTAL BEGINNINGS 

I. The Empire of Law and Fate 

II. The Advent of the Spirit 

III. Early Spiritual Reactions 

IV. The Burden and the Craving 



II 

THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 

WHEN the sage Koheleth, looking abroad over the 
world both of things and of men, said, "Every- 
thing hath He made beautiful in its time, also He 
hath put eternity in their heart/' he was living consciously in 
a confused and cloudy era, was speaking out of the heart of 
a twilight stratum of personality, which indeed he recognized 
as such. The finish of the sentence is, "yet not so that man 
findeth out the work which God hath wrought from the begin- 
ning and to the end." He sees himself midway in a great tide 
of being, of which the beginning and the end puzzle his reason ; 
but there is a power urging him on which he names Eternity, 
and which, whatever it may come eventually to mean, gives all 
the beauty of the world its excuse for existing. Not a mid- 
night this, but a twilight, wherein there is light enough to steer 
by, and wherein already, in the very heart of it, there is prom- 
ise of a coming dawn. A friend of mine has lately put this 
thought of Koheleth's into the familiar metre of Omar Khay- 
yam, extracting thereby its fragrance and poetic beauty: — 

In my own breast beats on Eternity. 

No mirage towers of Dreamlands yet to be, 

But — once I bent to taste an upland spring 
And, bending, heard it whisper of its Sea. 

I shape it not from perishable clay, 

Nor muse on clouds and hope to make them stay, 



But as the patient shell secretes the pearl 
So I secrete my Heaven from day to day. 



This gentle radiance of spiritual illumination, giving every 
darkest era enough light to live and find its destiny by, is no 
more and no less than the Bible elsewhere avers. It does not 

39 



40 THE LIFE INDEED 

shun the most seeming hopeless places. St. Paul, looking 
straight into the unspeakable corruption of his Roman times, 
thus describes it: 'Tor the invisible things of him from the 
creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by 
the things that are made, even his eternal power and God- 
head." This is not a mere Jew-bounded utterance, for he 
speaks with his eye on all the Gentile nations ; nor is it a truth 
of manhood alone, for his purview is generous enough to take 
in the world of things as well as of men. He is enunciating 
an elemental truth. In a word, our scripture period of evolu- 
tion not only begins with the vitalizing Spirit of God, but has 
the nourishing power of that Spirit, as much as it needs and 
can use, all along the way. 

Our study, it will be borne in mind, is a study of light: 
how life and immortality were brought to light. We are un- 
dertaking to estimate the life of the world, in its various eras, 
by the amount and nature of the light it had to grow by. 
Light, so to say, is our testing and measuring instrument. Let 
us, in imitation of our scientific brothers, call it by an appro- 
priate Greek name, our biometer. We may begin with the 
twilight; we need go no farther back, because, as we have 
just seen, our scripture estimate recognizes no absolute dark- 
ness. I have called this initial period the twilight stratum, 
instead of the twilight era. We get into the way, overmuch 
perhaps, of judging things according to the limiting conditions 
of time. We must in a measure discard that here. The tides 
of the informing spirit, we need to premise, are flowing through 
a hidden history wherein the bounds of space and time are 
lost, wherein one day is as a thousand years and a thousand 
years are as one day. So instead of saying there was a time 
when life lay in twilight, we had better say there is a stratum, 
a level, in human nature, existing as truly to-day as it ever did, 
wherein the soul moves in twilight dimness, seeing as through 
a glass darkly. We are not dealing, therefore, with ancient 
history, some long past analogy which we translate into terms 
of to-day; we are dealing with the thing itself, literal and 
present. We do not even have to go to the Turks and Bui- 



THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 41 

garians to find it; rather, from our purest heights of vision 
we can all look down into ourselves and see there levels and 
standards of living which, unless illumined from above, yield 
only dimness of outlook. The abysms of our nature are all 
there still, the underworld of crude instinct and earthly re- 
sponse to environment. We never get so far above this but 
that there come up echoes, however faint and far, of the "call 
of the wild." We may have risen above the tyranny of such 
things, but if so we have absorbed them, not abolished them. 
Or we may figure it scientifically, as soon as we see in man 
a being in process of evolution. The embryonic life of the 
body, they say, passes in swift epitome through the inchoate 
stages of nature: it is a unicellular germ, it breaks up by 
fission, is a vegetable, a sponge, a fish-like organism, succes- 
sively, before it takes on any semblance of man. Is the case 
less true of the embryonic life of the spirit? Must not it too 
have its period of development in bondage and immaturity and 
dimness, before it can see its parent Spirit as He is, and be- 
fore it can see whither it is bound? Well, this embryonic 
period is the twilight stratum of manhood, the level of life 
wherein by the nature of the case, the immortal outlook is not 
yet in sight. 

Of this spiritual evolution of ours we have already become 
aware, doubtless, of another differentiating trait; it is con- 
noted by the fact that manhood, when the Bible first sees it, 
has already won to the region of twilight and is no longer 
moving in utter gloom. Evolution, in its lower biologic stages, 
is figured as a blind fate-like thing, wherein the organism is 
wholly unconscious and passive, acted upon by mysterious 
forces which it cannot control or understand. The highest 
name that can be given to its motions is natural selection; the 
highest motive, survival of the fittest. That is the way evolu- 
tion looks, and that may indeed be an incident of its rudi- 
mental stage; though, as a matter of fact, we cannot tell hov/ 
far down consciousness begins, or how soon a spiritual im- 
pulse strikes into the game, and there are even those who think 
that all nature is alive, each thing with will and consciousness 



42 THE LIFE INDEED 

enough to fulfil its appointed function. With these specula- 
tions, however, we have nothing to do. We stand on plainer 
ground. In the stage to which we have attained, evolution is 
in progress in a being already endowed with reason and a will 
of his own; a being of whom the quaint Bible record says, 
''And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, 
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man be- 
came a living soul." In him therefore evolution has gained 
the self-conscious stage: has reached the point where the or- 
ganism, no longer mere passive clay, no longer even an un- 
sharing spectator from without, can see its life from within; 
can cast itself intelligently on life, and cooperate in its own 
development. So much outfit of life it has, though still in 
twilight. This is a very momentous element of the case. 
From this point onward, then, evolution is no longer a blind 
and arbitrary thing, but increasingly charged with wisdom and 
light. Already, too, it is deeply prophetic of its august goal, 
in the fact that it can share, in all its wealth of mind and ideal 
and will, in the mind of the Father of spirits from whom it 
comes. The organism now being evolved is a thinking or- 
ganism. Its moulding power still comes, as absolutely as ever, 
from the mysterious Reality without; but its light comes from 
within, or rather by way of the manhood spirit within. 

We must speak now in nobler terms than we apply to crys- 
tals and germ-cells; in terms of personality. For while the 
progressive discovery of the path of life may still be like obey- 
ing nature forces, like the fire ascending to seek the sun, or the 
magnetic needle vibrating loyally to the great earth-currents 
of the pole, yet it expresses itself in the idiom of free strong 
manhood : it is the son seeking the Father and the ways of the 
Father's home, and the glory of the family likeness. This it 
truly is, however for a time it may stumble among dark moun- 
tains, or render a dim and wavering allegiance, or even by its 
own will incur bondage to the conditions of its existence. For 
its twilight is gradually brightening toward day; its ordered 
steps are leading in the direction of freedom. 



THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 43 



I. THE EMPIRE OF LAW AND FATE 

We are now ready to consider what the Bible conceives to 
be the essential character of this twilight stratum of life. A 
late scripture writer, tracing the expression of this to a com- 
manding personage, and to its national aspect, says, ''The 
law was given by Moses," — by law meaning the whole com- 
prehensive dispensation before his time, as it is interpreted 
from an era of greater light. On our cosmic scale, which in 
spite of its racial unit is truly the scale of the Bible, we may 
call this the empire of law and fate. It is just the thing that 
is most plainly and universally before us, saints and scientists 
alike: the human soul, which never asked or chose to be 
breathed into earthly life, pursuing its activities here a little 
while, and finding out the principles and order of them, then 
suddenly, without will of its own, disappearing into the unseen 
again. It is the most elemental picture that man can draw of 
his own mortal existence: the background on which all the 
colors and shadings of Kfe appear. That this compendious 
assessment of life is reduced to the term law, and that this 
law, however rudimentally revealed, becomes a reign of law, 
and empire over all the centres and outlying provinces of 
human nature, is not only a deduction of science, a matter of 
pride for these latter days; it is the recognized commonplace 
of Scripture, by which its large record of life is defined in two 
coordinated and correlated halves. If the higher and illumi- 
nate hemisphere of life is grace and truth, as these came by 
Jesus Christ, no less truly its lower and basal hemisphere is 
law, as this is identified with Moses. In other words, this 
was the essential character of what we call the Old Testament 
dispensation; distinguishing it from, and perhaps contrasting 
it to, what a deep-seeing later thinker called "the dispensation 
of the fulness of times." 

That this empire of law coincides with a twilight stratum 
of life is indicated historically by the fact that the Old Testa- 
ment man, from his determining standard of law, has not yet 



44 THE LIFE INDEED 

discovered immortality, except as a vague longing and dread. 
The life beyond, to him, is not a motive and inspiration, but 
an enigma; is not really a life at all, but a sort of punctuation 
mark to earth, a virtual stoppage and negation of life; which 
at its sternest is figured as an austere paying-off of old scores 
in the coin of rewards and punishments, and at its mercifulest 
does not get beyond the idea of release and rest. Under this 
law empire the human soul is, so to say, caught and tamed; is 
brought under the all-encompassing domination, I had almost 
said tyranny, of prescription and prohibition. And as long 
as he is there he is not consciously the son of God, but the 
slave and culprit of God, who can hardly choose but err, or 
the puppet of God, moved by the unchosen strings of his 
being's law. It is best not to mince matters here: this, re- 
duced to lowest terms, is the real state of the case. No doubt 
it is right; I dare say it ought to be so; at any rate it is so. 
The empire of law becomes an empire of fate, which the 
thought of another life, turned back in recompense or retri- 
bution on this, only accentuates. 

I hardly need pause here to say, that in this matter we are 
simply following, at a somev/hat higher level, the ascertained 
order of nature. If there is any one thing that has become 
thoroughly ingrained in men's minds, as the fruit of the scien- 
tific movement of the last century, that has been made the 
corner-stone and basis of all the rest, it is the idea that we 
are living under an all-encompassing, inexorable empire of law. 
It is just this idea that has made us so nervous about miracles 
and the supernatural or extra-natural; filling, as it does, the 
universe so full that there seems no room for anything else. 
It has got into literature as intolerantly as into science: we 
are impatient of things like the Arabian Nights and Gulliver's 
Travels, which deal with freaks and marvels, and relegate 
these to the nursery where fairy tales are more in order ; while 
even there the children are learning to say, ''Of course it isn't 
so, the author just said so." Everywhere we are adjusting 
ourselves, have adjusted ourselves, to a reign of law. And 
everywhere, too, we have, in spite of ourselves, very largely 



THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 45 

conformed our imagination to a reign of fate, wherein, always 
at an untimely moment, 

Comes the blind Fury with the abhorred shears, 

And slits the thin-spun life. 

That is why the idea of immortality still persists as a longing 
and a dread, or at highest as a safety and a rest, but not really 
as a life, or as a welcomed birth to nobler things. One thinks 
of the vague fears and apprehensions that connect themselves 
with accidents and catastrophes of nature, and chances of 
sudden death, as if all beyond our control were chaotic and 
unordered; and then one thinks, by contrast, of that Man who 
sailed our earthly seas, and who, when the storm was fiercest 
and disciples were frantic with terror, was quietly asleep on a 
pillow. The contrast goes deep. It takes hold of the roots 
of life. We cannot reason it away; our emancipation from 
such fears must come quite otherwise; and the large scripture 
way is the only v/ay to bring it about; it comes, so to say, only 
by the way of the Son of man. Still, quite apart from the 
proof or illustration of it, the deep contrast remains: a con- 
trast in mood, attitude, tone, between the soul consciously sub- 
ject to unchosen law and blind fate, and the soul consciously 
sharing life with the Wisdom and Spirit of the universe. And 
this is what, in the sequel of our study, the contrast will 
amount to. It is the unforced consciousness of things, the 
spirit oppressed or hopeful, that counts in life, not the labored 
logic by which we try to persuade our minds. We shall follow 
life to the point where, in the face of storm and mystery, it 
can calmly rest its head on a. pillow; can bask, as it were, in 
the light to which it has won, knowing that all is well. 

But we must traverse a twilight period first, just as also 
nature must. And the felt empire of law and fate, which gives 
tone to that period, is a sound and sturdy stratum of life; it 
develops the principle, the stamina, the strong fibre, by which 
the soul can do its work in the world, and build its ideals of 
character. It learns to love its reign of law, and it lays its 
foundations deep beneath the surface; and though it moves 
in dimness of outlook, yet the night has its stars and its 



46 THE LIFE INDEED 

brightening East, and God gives it also songs in the night and 
compensating joys. 

It would be very interesting, if we had the space, to follow 
into detail the dominance of law, gradually widening and 
deepening, from its rudimental beginnings to the darkest hour 
of its twilight, just before the dawn. All we can do, however, 
is to touch on a few salient points. The Hebrew word for law, 
torahj did not to begin with have just the meaning that we 
have come to attribute to the term, when we speak, for in- 
stance, of English law, or of the laws of nature; though it did 
approach the modern meaning afterward, as it was seen to 
cover more of life and the world. We have divested it of per- 
sonality; it has become to our consciousness a sort of mechan- 
ical thing, a fate, which renders no account of itself. With the 
Hebrew, on the contrary, the personal origin of law was of 
its very essence; in his mind to legislate, to give tor ah as he 
expressed it, meant nearly the same as to give orders or in- 
struction, as a general gives orders to his army, or as a teacher 
gives instruction to his class. Further, its ultimate source was 
always thought of as God Himself; the form it took in the 
mouth of lawgiver or priest or prophet never dispelled this 
idea; and accordingly, to the end of the chapter, the authority 
of law, torahy was accepted as absolute. That is, the personal 
will of God was to the Hebrew practically the same as the 
order of nature is to us; and his personality, in following that 
will, went through a development quite analogous to what we 
recognize in our bodies, in the laws of evolution, heredity, 
growth, and indeed, when we understand his quaint but semi- 
nal Hebrew idiom, identical with what we trace in the human 
mind, in basal rudiments, customs, institutions, history. Time 
fails me, of course, to enlarge on this, as given in the Old Tes- 
tament; but it is all there, and all in a natural and self -evi- 
dencing order. It seems to have been the world mission of 
the Semitic race, as Professor McCurdy points out, to furnish 
the type, the norm of things, for the Aryan race to take up 
and fill out in arts and civilization. "In nearly everything 
vital to human well-being," he says, ''the Semites were the 



THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 47 

founders or forerunners." And the seminal principles of life, 
the pioneer impulses, are best depicted in this book of theirs, 
which just on that account has become the Bible of the edu- 
cated and civilized world. 

We speak, in biology, of the law of the species, that rigid 
law by which every animal instinctively conforms to the ways 
of its kind. A blind law, our thoughts make this, a law which 
the animal has no mind to reason out, and no choice but to 
obey. Well, the Hebrew law was just a kind of magnified law 
of the species; only, being personal and conscious, he went 
into it with his eyes open; and its appeal was always made 
to his reason as well as to his instinct. In other words, from 
the very beginning he was expected and encouraged to co- 
operate with it. There was a two-fold element in it; and the 
power of two worlds, the austere under-world of his primordial 
nature, and the free upper-world of his manhood. But for the 
rest, he never got beyond the tether of his species conscious- 
ness. He merely spread it out into wider areas: from the 
family, taking its law from a patriarchal head, to the clan, 
Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau; then to the tribe, tracing 
up allegiance to a common ancestor; then through slavery and 
deliverance and conquest to the nation, which for the first time 
could begin to legislate and write its laws for permanent use, 
on stone; then finally, as nationality failed, to a race. That is 
as far as the Hebrew, as such, ever got. To this day the 
Hebrews remain a race apart, with an intense, exclusive, al- 
most fanatical race consciousness, virtually the species con- 
sciousness writ large. It remained for the Aryan race to take 
up the matter where they laid it down, and develop the re- 
gards of men from Judaism to Christianity, from the nation 
and the race to the world and the universal humanity. They 
might indeed have done this, and their Pioneer, of their own 
royal line, was ready; if they had not, in an evil hour, per- 
versely chosen to reject Him, and thus commit their manhood 
to an arrested development. The result is before us, for the 
world to see; the enlarging humanitarian consciousness of our 
latest age is every day making it plainer. 



48 THE LIFE INDEED 

But to go back to the spirit of their old law. Its main effort 
and impact, as you know, was prohibition and restraint: al- 
ways directed to curbing and bringing into order the imperious 
surge of the natural man toward lawless freedom. It took 
men as we take children, saying, ^'You mustn't do this, you 
mustn't touch that, you mustn't." You have noted how all 
the commandments of the two tables, except one, are prohibi- 
tions, "Thou shalt not"; they recognize the things to which 
men too naturally tend, and put the bridle there. "Ye shall 
not do," said Moses to them at the outer edge of the wilderness, 
"ye shalt not do after all the things that we do here this day, 
every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes." It was a 
kind of negative life that was thus contemplated. We can 
imagine some progressive minded man in his audience break- 
ing in here and saying, "You have told us what not to do, but 
when we have obeyed your prohibitions to the full where are 
we then? What shall we do? How shall we take this tabula 
rasa of a life and enrich it? The decks are cleared for action, 
all the clutter and impedimenta removed by your 'Thou shalt 
nots'; now where is the foe to fight, where is the victory to 
win? All that you have left us positively to do, barring some 
ceremonies and sanitary rules, is to honor our fathers and 
mothers; but we must be fathers and mothers some day; how 
then shall we in turn be ourselves worthy of honor, and es- 
pecially in the new conditions of action that times will surely 
bring?" Well, that was left to the future, to the time when 
they would be out of the wilderness, and be no longer 
scolded children but full-grown men, adult and ready to act 
for themselves. "For ye are not as yet come," said the ven- 
erable lawgiver, "to the rest and to the inheritance which the 
Lord your God giveth you." His law was made for a con- 
sciously unfinal stage of manhood; and so it remained to the 
end, not because it was inadequate or unwise or not volumi- 
nous enough, but precisely because it was law. The law, the 
police regulation of the world, operates to protect society and 
keep men out of — or put them into — jail; but what life, 
what ideal, what spiritual energy, does it, as law, put within 



THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 49 

them? Clearly, it represents only the negative half of a di- 
vided whole; and all that makes positive manhood, according 
to the Maker's image, is beyond. 

From these rudiments of law, wherein we see men just going 
under the yoke, our thoughts go out to an empire of law, 
wherein a universe is caught and tamed; we try to think what 
the world would be like if it were what the biologists want it 
to be, a world of law and nothing else. We look into the 
animal world, which God created and called very good; and 
there we note the species, each in its own compartment of na- 
ture, each with its species consciousness and obeying its species 
law. What do these different species, all from one Creator, 
do? They fear one another; they fight one another; they 
devour one another. There seems to be a law in their members 
impelling them to it. Poets have brooded over it, as if the 
world were radically cruel and unfeeling; they call it ''nature 
red in tooth and claw." And yet all this seems mellow music 
compared with what goes on all the while among us. The 
law of our digestive organs calls for animal food; and what 
is that army of our species out there in the Chicago shambles 
doing all day long, and year after year, but kill, kill, kill, — 
that we may eat the flesh? Or if we have scruples against 
such slaughter, and, choosing rather to be underfed and 
anaemic, confine ourselves to vegetable food, we have only re- 
moved the matter one step back, we are still destroying the 
protoplasmic life of lower creatures to build up our own bodies. 
The law in our members, the law of our species, demands it; 
there seems to be no consideration of mercy or sympathy or 
even justice in the matter. It is all unrelieved law: nature 
preserving her integrity and uniformity, calm and severe, yet 
beneath the surface full of fear and fighting and devouring. 

Is it essentially different when we come to the domain of 
the higher law, as unrelieved law I mean, with its rigid stand- 
ards on the one hand, its atmosphere of bondage and restraint 
on the other? What sort of world would this be if the Old 
Testament dispensation had been perpetual, and had remained 
unrelieved by more genial elements, that magnified law of the 



50 THE LIFE INDEED 

species of which I was speaking a few minutes ago? Well, 
we have a historical example, in our own modern times, to 
illustrate it for us. We honor the Puritans, and trace much 
of our noblest and strongest convictions of right and conscience 
to them. But once in their history they got their doctrines 
and sentiments a little out of balance, and reverted overmuch 
to the earlier ways, when the reign of Mosaic law was unre- 
lieved by grace and. truth. This is how Macaulay describes 
it: 

"After the fashion of oppressed sects, they mistook their 
own vindictive feelings for emotions of piety, encouraged in 
themselves by reading and meditation a disposition to brood 
over their wrongs, and, when they had worked themselves up 
into hating their enemies, imagined that they were only hating 
the enemies of heaven. In the New Testament there was little 
indeed which, even when perverted by the most disingenuous 
exposition, could seem to countenance the indulgence of male- 
volent passions. But the Old Testament contained the history 
of a race selected by God to be witnesses of his unity and min- 
isters of his vengeance, and specially commanded by him to 
do many things which, if done without his special command, 
would have been atrocious crimes. In such a history it was 
not difficult for fierce and gloomy spirits to find much that 
might be distorted to suit their wishes. The extreme Puritans 
therefore began to feel for the Old Testament a preference, 
which, perhaps, they did not distinctly avow even to them- 
selves; but which showed itself in all their sentiments and 
habits. They paid to the Hebrew language a respect which 
they refused to that tongue in which the discourses of Jesus 
and the epistles of Paul have come down to us. They baptized 
their children by the names, not of Christian saints, but of 
Hebrew patriarchs and warriors. In defiance of the express 
and reiterated declarations of Luther and Calvin, they turned 
the weekly festival by which the Church had, from the primi- 
tive times, commemorated the resurrection of her Lord, into 
a Jewish Sabbath. They sought for principles of jurispru- 
dence in the Mosaic law, and for precedents to guide their 



THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 51 

ordinary conduct in the books of Judges and Kings. Their 
thoughts and discourse ran much on acts which were assuredly 
not recorded as examples for our imitation. The prophet who 
hewed in pieces a captive king, the rebel general who gave the 
blood of a queen to the dogs, the matron who, in defiance of 
plighted faith, and of the laws of eastern hospitality, drove 
the nail into the brain of the fugitive ally who had just fed at 
her board, and who was sleeping under the shadow of her tent, 
were proposed as models to Christians suffering under the 
tyranny of princes and prelates. Morals and manners were 
subjected to a code resembling that of the synagogue, when 
the synagogue was in its worst state." 

A trenchant indictment this; we leave out of the question 
whether Macaulay exaggerated it, or left it too one-sided. 
What we are to note here is that this describes not merely an 
era in history but a stratum of human nature. What is all 
this but a reversion to the twilight stratum? Given such 
and such conditions, let the prevailing sentiment, even the 
sacred zeal of divine law, be too unrelieved and too intolerant, 
and the Puritan of the seventeenth century after Christ be- 
comes at heart like the Jew of the prechristian centuries; he 
has magnified that law of the species and of the race until he 
can hardly let other species and races exist, or at least can 
hardly let exist what they stand for and what perhaps has been 
bred in the law of their being. 

Yet all this time Jews and Puritans alike have, as St. Paul 
says, consented to the law that it is holy and just and good; 
have rejoiced in it after the inward man. The empire of law 
has engendered ideals; nay the ideal of its own perfection and 
universality, the ideal of its sacredness and unsearchable 
depth, was at the bottom of that Puritan intolerance and nar- 
rowness. The very law of the species, with its fear and its 
fighting, is ideally the integrity of the species. All the ideals 
of character that rose in the mind of the Old Testament 
worthies merely reflected this fact at different sides and angles. 
The stern yet tonic ideal of duty, what is this but giving every 
obligation, every responsibility, every law of our being, its 



52 THE LIFE INDEED 

just due? The comprehensive ideal of righteousness again, 
which is the high summit to which Old Testament conduct 
tends, what is this? '^In this word righteousness," says 
Brierly, '' . . .we need beware lest we take an emotional sub- 
stitute for the actual meaning. For, in heaven and upon earth, 
it has only one meaning, rightness, which again means always 
conformity to the law of things. In all her myriad depart- 
ments. Nature has one rule of conduct towards us. She pays 
according to our conformity to her law." In this ideal, then, 
we have merely the law of great nature writ large, and made 
into an empire over our sturdiest and severest character. God 
Himself, too, is a God of righteousness; He embodies His own 
law. Or take the highest ideal of all, remote, withdrawn, the 
ideal that mystics have appropriated to themselves and that 
seems inaccessible to common and lay humanity, — the ideal 
of holiness. 'This latter word," says Brierly again, ''we now 
recognize as signifying neither less nor more than 'wholeness.' 
It means the full equipment of manhood, the highest state of 
body, soul, and spirit." Well, what is being a whole man, but 
having all the functions in vital running order, rejoicing to 
obey the laws of their being? The empire of law creates a 
demand for its own perfection; it is inexorable, intolerant if 
you please; it will not be satisfied until it has drawn into its 
jurisdiction the whole man and every man. 

And yet at its highest and holiest, the empire of law, as such, 
is still in the twilight stratum; it has not the light and life of 
the hemisphere beyond itself. I am not saying this to bring 
an indictment against law, or to intimate that the twilight 
stratum is therefore evil. I am optimistic enough to believe, 
as I look the field of truth over, that things come to light just 
about as fast as they ought to, and on the whole just about in 
the order they ought to. You see, the great body of humanity 
is an inert thing, and stubbornly conservative; a huge mass to 
move forward through life; and every step of progress has to 
be naturalized, to be trodden in, until it becomes the posses- 
sion not of the philosopher or illuminated prophet alone, but 
of the community, of the rank and file; and it has to become 



THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 53 

an atmosphere, which men breathe without thinking, or a sun- 
Hght, which warms and guides men while they do not realize 
its meaning or power. We must judge humanity by its ele- 
mental endowments, and by the light which has become ele- 
mental within them. 

To say, then, that while our nature is still under unrelieved 
law it is still in twilight, and cannot see the immortal dawn 
beyond, is merely to say that law can only move in its own 
orbit until it comes round full circle, can only contemplate its 
own completion, and that until this is accomplished cannot 
take up, cannot even see, the next and risen stage of being. 
Consider the case. We will suppose that a man has walked 
in all the statutes of the law blameless, that according to the 
"most strictest'' sect of Hebraism he has, like Job, to appear 
proudly before his Maker with his record on his shoulder. 
What then? Why, he gets his award. Judgment is passed upon 
him, the just verdict is rendered for what he is and has been. 
Or suppose, like you and me, he faces the great Reality of 
things with many gaps and faults, many evil things, in his life's 
record. What then? Why again, he gets his just judgment. 
The books are posted and balanced, all the old scores paid off, 
and the whole matter of life becomes a finality. That is all 
that the empire of law, that is all that the man who in his life 
has only law, can see. His case is settled, and the punctuation 
mark is appended. The next generation comes on and goes 
through the same circle, to the same award of commendation 
or penalty. Again we must ask, What then? The rest, so 
far as law can see, is fate. The law has not imparted life but 
only ordered it; has ordered it well, has opened ample room 
for duty and righteousness and wholeness. But when the law 
has done with educating the man, and when untimely death 
comes, it has at best only got him where he is in shape for 
unincumbered duty and righteousness and holiness to begin, 
while the most of men, unlike Job, must die with their record 
of conformity to law still far short of its best. And the light 
beyond, the next stage of evolution in life, is still as much in 
the dark as ever. If there had been a law given which could 



54 THE LIFE INDEED 

have given life, as St. Paul says, if life were by the law at 
all, verily righteousness should have been by the law. The 
law is not to blame; but when the mystery of introduction to 
another state of existence comes the law stratum of our being 
simply has nothing to connote more life, it connotes only its 
own end and reckoning. We can see now, therefore, why, 
when the Old Testament men looked at death all they could 
imagine after it was some kind of payment, reward or punish- 
ment, or it may be safety and rest; but that was not new and 
higher life, that was not truly immortality at all. And this 
because neither the immortality nor the real principle and fibre 
of life had emerged into light. It belongs to a higher stratum 
of manhood, where fate has passed on into resurrection. 

II. THE ADVENT OF THE SPIRIT 

But what is the spirit doing all this time? We have seen 
it in the beginning of things, brooding like a mother-bird on 
the face of the waters, as if it would warm the waste of chaos 
into life and organism. And the very first thing that took 
place thereafter, according to the sublime old record, was the 
beginning of that motion, or pulsation, which we have taken 
as our biometer, or measure of life. "And God said. Let there 
be light: and there was light." Before the sun and stars were 
created, as this strange account goes, light came into being; 
and whether or not, as the scientists are conjecturing, it may 
have been due to some radio-activity in the inchoate matter, 
its origin here is described as spiritual, with a mind and a 
decree and a will working in it. 

In our too narrow-minded study of the Bible we have al- 
most lost sight of this initial power of creation and its stored- 
up potencies. Certainly, it would seem, that spiritual beginning 
of things ought to have continued in operation, working still 
at the core and centre of creation, and always radiating enough 
light to make its presence and nature evident. It has been 
tacitly supposed, however, that the spirit of God, having come 
upon the scene and set things running, then proceeded to take 



THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 55 

a long vacation, not to be heard of again definitely until the 
Day of Pentecost, a.d. 33, was fully come; after which date 
He was a resident of our earth, having infused Himself, like 
flame, into the hearts of men. The long intervening history, 
then, is imagined as devoid of any divine spirit; men getting 
along supposedly the best they could by their own natural 
light and impulse, and of course always stumbling and stiff- 
necked, making mistakes or setting up rebellions, and incur- 
ring punishments. To be sure, Bezaleel, the son of Uri, who 
built the tabernacle, was said to have been endowed by the 
spirit of God for the purpose; and sometimes the spirit came 
mysteriously upon exceptional men; upon Samson, making 
him preternaturally strong, and upon prophets, filling them 
with a kind of divine frenzy and eloquence. But these in- 
stances were not supposed really to count for much, and the 
disposition was to explain them away. The Pentecostal spirit, 
in fact, was so transcendent, and so immediately reducible to 
religious insight and energy, that all the earlier history of the 
spirit was cast into the shade, as if it were a sporadic matter 
and virtually non-existent. It is as if the spirit had acted 
consciously in the first impulse, and then become reflex or 
automatic, working in the world as does breathing or digestion 
in our bodies, but having to give thought and concentrated 
will to the starting, just as we have to do in learning to swim 
or play the piano. It is remarkable that the late Professor 
Cope, one of our most eminent biologists, gives just this ex- 
planation of the beginning of life on our globe: conscious ef- 
fort at first, enough to set the vital machinery of organism 
going; this he calls archaestheticism; then, the life-pulsation 
being trained by repetition into habit, the machinery going on 
automatically by itself; all of which he calls catagenesis. 

But if Professor Cope, looking on as a spectator from out- 
side, can see so far into the creative act as that, we have him at 
a great advantage ; for we have reached the stage of life where 
evolution has become conscious of itself, and where we can 
cooperate in bringing it about; we are inside the game, and 
have a light in our hearts which enables us to trace in some 



56 THE LIFE INDEED 

degree the divine initiative and pattern. To us, as to him, 
things look as if they lived and grew of themselves; but from 
our high station within, where we can put forth will, and use 
nature's laws to conscious purpose, and perpetuate life in an 
image at once human and divine, we ought to arrive at a 
worthier, less purely mechanical explanation than his. Our 
scientific apparatus is finer; it can go beyond terms of vibra- 
tion and natural selection to terms of inner light and volition. 
And our text-book, the Bible, thinking in these terms, traces 
life inward to the informing spirit of God. True, it may take 
a poet, specially gifted and consecrated, to have a keen sense 
of that spirit's working in nature, and to put that sense into 
utterance. Enough, however, for our comfort, that the vision 
exists in humanity; a vision which, because we can respond 
to the poet, we may deem to exist, though it may be dimly, in 
all of us. Wordsworth, whose life was consecrated to this very 
thing, found what his penetrative spirit sought, 

a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought. 
And rolls through all things. 

But the vision is not the monopoly of poets, nor confined to 
that sublimated region of seas and skies and sunsets. It 
exists in things nearer home; its clearest and most motive- 
giving realization is in the common man. Elihu, you re- 
member, that self-confident young man who was going to set 
Job and his friends right, puts it into words. "There is a 
spirit in man," he says, "and the inspiration of the Almighty 
giveth them understanding." We have the light in ourselves, 
shared with the light and will of the world; clear enough for 
every one to interrogate and utilize in active life. 

Here then is the situation of things : the spirit of God, which 
in the beginning brooded over chaos, and the spirit of man 



THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 57 

answering to it, as face answereth face in a glass. But it is 
time now to begin on a definition; to begin on it, I say, for it 
will take all the rest of our discussions to compass the matter 
in full. What is spirit? what is a spirit? Well, I do not 
profess to be enough in the counsels of heaven to define the 
spirit of God; but we must, and I think we can get a working- 
idea of the spirit that is in ourselves; that part of power of 
our manhood of which George Bernard Shaw, else so sure of 
things, says cautiously, ''if I may so name the unknown." We 
had better begin simply, even though at the risk of landing 
this side of an adequate conception. We all have an idea 
what is meant by the spirit of a crowd, or of a poem, or of 
an age; we distinguish between the spirit and the letter of a 
law; we have sometimes to take the spirit of a poor speaker 
in lieu of his clumsy words, like taking the will for the deed. 
In any such case we have a sense of a certain animus or direc- 
tion of personality concentrated on some specific object or 
character, and working as one energy. And now let us think 
of the man we were describing, a being introduced here into 
a complex world, which he gradually discovers to be a world 
of law, with which he must intelligently coordinate his own 
nature, doing this in a way for himself alone, for no two men 
are alike. Well, my idea of his spirit is, that it is the reaction 
of his individuality on his world. Let us not complicate 
matters here by speculating on a disembodied spirit floating 
off by itself after death, or, if such a thing is possible, arrested 
and corraled by a medium; enough for us at first if we can 
understand a spirit still in the body and in this life. If we can 
know how it will react on this world, we are in the best shape 
to learn how it will react on any world, seen or unseen; that, 
perhaps, is what our bodies are given us for, to be the organs 
of this reaction and life-energy. 

We sometimes get our thoughts tangled up by making a 
sort of dissection of our nature: as if we were made up of 
three separable parts, body, soul, and spirit; and the idea of 
this threefold combination leads to endless puzzling of mind 
over the question what part each plays in the personality, and 



58 THE LIFE INDEED 

what may be saved from the wreck when the being is disin- 
tegrated by the failure of the body. I think that speculations 
on such a basis are bound to be futile and barren. We cannot 
cipher out the problem by cutting the man into pieces; he 
must be and remain a unity, all one man and one character, 
moving all together if he move at all. We do not save him 
by working with or supposing any process of disintegration, 
not even the disintegration of physical death. As to this three- 
fold division, which is natural enough, we may most simply 
conceive of it somehow thus: Man has a body, by means of 
which he makes connection with this world, its sights and 
sounds, its meats and drinks, its pleasures and pains; man has 
a spirit, by which he reacts on a world unseen, its ideas and 
ideals, its life and light and laws; but man is a living soul, 
subsisting here between two worlds, and electing to give su- 
preme allegiance to the one or the other. Man is a living soul; 
that is what he became when God breathed into his nostrils 
the breath of life. But that is what also the animals are 
called: HJIl tTSJ, a living soul, a living creature. In this re- 
spect he does not differ from them; he too is an animal, with 
the breath of the universal life-force in his body. But he 
has also this unique endowment, the spirit, by which he moves 
in a region above the law of the species, and becomes an in- 
dividual, with a character all his own. I am not saying the 
animals have no spirit, no reflex of that mighty life-force; 
"who knoweth . . . the spirit of the beast, whether it goeth 
downward to the earth?" says Koheleth. With this, however, 
the Scripture is not dealing; and it is in the nature of the case 
beyond our ken, which has enough to do to understand the 
spirit of our kind. But on the principle "By their fruits ye 
shall know them" we may certainly say his spirit differs from 
theirs not in degree but in kind: he is of them, with a spirit 
that rises enormously, infinitely beyond them; nay his spirit is 
not that of the animal at all; if he suffers it to become so, by 
vice or dissipation, it is his ruin; he does not even make a 
decent beast. 

Here, then, he is placed, in this world of law, with a light 



THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 59 

in him by which he can become acquainted with it, and with 
its personal Source and Will, and by which he can react on 
these as he will. There is a long and rugged road for him to 
traverse, before a personality so richly endowed becomes ma- 
ture. I am not sure that in this world at all it can become 
much more than an embryonic life, ^- on the true standard, I 
mean; I am tempted to think it cannot when I see what halt- 
ing, bungling work men and nations make of living. But here 
he is, getting more life and broader horizons step by step, and 
getting more light to guide him, as his eyes become better 
educated. 'Tor with thee," said a Psalmist, ''is the fountain 
of life: in thy light shall we see light." A curious thing, this 
gradual education in the perception of light. I read an article 
the other day in a scientific journal which furnished so striking 
an analogue to our subject that I first thought anew how pro- 
foundly true were Goethe's familiar words, 

Alles Vergangliche 
1st nur ein Gleichnls, 

"everything transitory is only a parable," and then I half hesi- 
tated to bring it in here lest it might seem fantastic and 
allegorical. It was about the color-sense, as it is found to be 
developed in primitive peoples. An observer in one of the 
Philippine islands discovered that the native Visayan dialect 
had definite names only for the colors at the red end of the 
spectrum, where the vibrations are slowest; that with the color 
green the words became vague and wavering, seeming to sug- 
gest only the idea of unripe things, like grass or uncured grain; 
and that all above this, toward the blue end of the spectrum, 
where the vibrations were most rapid, the dialect must have 
recourse to the later Spanish. Then on interrogating school- 
children and others he found that all could distinguish red 
well and green fairly well, though with some uncertainty be- 
tween that and brown; but that blue, a bright blue garment 
for instance, puzzled them all, some calling it green, others 
black. On further inquiry, by him and others, it was found 
to be a pretty universal fact that primitive folk discern colors 



6o THE LIFE INDEED 

in this invariable order: reds first, and so on upward, always 
in the order of the spectrum; but that comparatively high 
civilization is needed before they be sure of blue at all. All 
this lies simply in the eye's accommodating itself to different 
rates of vibration. Is the spiritual order something like this, 
as men go from animalism upward? They can see red first, 
the color of blood and raw flesh and war; then they can see 
green, for it is the color of their green earth, and all growing 
and unripe things ; but blue, the color of the sky, they see last 
of all, and only by advanced education; to them the sky is 
either black, like an abyss or a midnight, or else it is green, 
like their unripe earth, unready for harvest. What a simple 
and suggestive gamut of light is here, and how it makes us 
think of that welter of slow development, during which the 
spirit, reacting on its universe, is approaching the maturity of 
its powers when, its blood-red wars and violences past, it can 
look wisely toward heaven and know that it is neither the 
blackness of death nor the green, immature continuation of 
this earth life! Well, it is a parable, like everything transi- 
tory; but the dream is true. The spirit is receiving its orderly 
education in life and light; and the two keep pace with each 
other, each the measure of the other. 

III. EARLY SPIRITUAL REACTIONS 

But we have kept our empire of law waiting all this time, 
stationary, while we went back to bring up to date that being 
who by his endowment of spirit could understand the law and 
by obedience or accommodation or even transgression react 
upon it. There it has remained as it will remain, a universal 
thing; all the creation, high and low, must bow to it late or 
soon; and one jot or tittle shall not pass from it until all be 
fulfilled. Now you see what this spiritual reaction is: it is 
a kind of initiative, wherein man by his innate wisdom or 
folly takes things into his own hands, and so by experience of 
effects learns his being's law, and is not merely told it; learns, 
and if he obeys, obeys freely, rather than like a machine which 



THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 6i 

is wound up and must go. We have made transition to the 
higher ground which befits the Hfe of free spirit. The whole 
scale of things too, for good and evil, is vastly enlarged: the 
glory more transcendent, the woe more deep and ruinous; we 
could deal with no mere animal life on such ground. It is the 
spirit that marks the difference. 

Sooner or later, being personal, we estimate things accord- 
ing to our own nature, and recognize the personal source of 
this empire of law: as the Hebrews figured it in their tor ah, 
it is like the orders of a general to his soldiers, or the instruc- 
tion of a teacher to his class. Now what shall be the first 
personal response, the first spiritual reaction, of a being who 
to begin with is like a callow child, with no wise experience 
of life, and no contact as yet with the solemn consequences of 
things? For so, down in that twilight stratum, we must needs 
figure man as beginning. 

The scripture answer to this question, which is embodied 
in the quaint old story of Adam and Eve and the forbidden 
fruit, shows the primitive man that is in us two things: first, 
that a command given from such a source, as we say, "means 
business,'' it cannot safely be trifled with; and secondly, the 
strange principle afterward phrased by St. Paul, that by the 
law is the knowledge of sin. That silly couple, as we deem 
them, acted just as we probably should have done; just like 
those hapless children of whom every week the newspaper 
reports, who "didn't know it was loaded," or like those idle 
fellows who out of sheer wanton curiosity toy with a dangerous 
machine. A great many children of a larger growth find out 
to-day, I see it not infrequently in students and their reaction 
toward new college enactments, that, as the slangs ters say, 
it won't do to meddle with the buzz-saw. The spiritual re- 
action must go deeper than that; we must learn to take our 
empire of law seriously enough for our own good, and not be 
so idly facile as to be equally ready, as the chance comes, to 
listen to a God or a serpent. 

I know how much has been made of that Adam and Eve 



62 THE LIFE INDEED 

story; how Milton, voicing an almost morbid Puritan con- 
science, described its portentous effects: 

Earth trembled from her entrails, as agam 

In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan; 

Sky loured, and, muttering thunder, some sad drops 

Wept at completing of the mortal Sin 

Original. 

And indeed the story goes deep; I have no disposition to be- 
little it, far less laugh it away; I do not profess to give only 
one small aspect of it. But we see human nature there, our 
own human nature. We see too, even there, an authentic up- 
rise of the human spirit; and we see how light, our spiritual 
biometer, kept pace with it. Their eyes were opened, and for 
the first time man was as gods, seeing good and evil. The 
effects were bad as well as good ; but I confess that if this was 
the fall of man it looks to me uncommonly like a fall upward. 
Our first parents did not take life seriously enough, to begin 
with; though afterward Adam, having learned his costly lesson, 
went to work like a good boy^ under his yoke of divine law, 
his spirit bowing itself docilely to the order of things. His 
eldest son, however, was not so at all; he was what we call 
a bad lot. Perhaps there was an inherited crook in his nature; 
at any rate, while on the one side he was energetic, active, un- 
meditative, thoroughly masculine, on the other he was turbu- 
lent, self-centred, blindly set on making things bend to his 
own untamed will. We may be sure he never would have been 
tempted to self-indulgence by a woman. It made him sick 
to see Abel there, so sweetly pious and so in divine favor; 
though he too went stolidly through the motions of worship 
and got no inner satisfaction from it. Do you reflect that, for 
good or ill, here is one half of humanity, the active, over- 
coming, business half? After his dreadful deed of murder, 
the supreme sin, he went forth, you remember, to found cities, 
and subdue the earth, and beget children who were the origi- 
nators of the arts of life, agriculture, and music, and the fine 
and useful arts of craftsmanship. From his family, according 
to the Bible record, came the beginnings of civilization. Evi- 



THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 63 

dently here is a strain of human nature not to be ignored but 
dealt with and developed. Perhaps he took this world, with 
its worldly tasks and absorptions, too seriously; I am pretty 
sure that his half of mankind does. And he must be dealt 
with on his own ground, the ground of his own turbulent 
masterful spirit. It requires a new combination with the law 
of things. This is how the Bible story actually takes him. 
For though he had no heart for the supreme law of manhood, 
to be his brother's keeper and lover, he did not fall into his 
murderous deed unadvisedly or without adequate warning. 
'Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen?" 
was the question that somehow had already found way into 
his lowering mind; ''if thou doest well, is there not an uplift 
to go with it, — not a morose, ill-at-ease, falling spirit?" But 
you want to be doing something, instead of worshipping, do 
you? It is in you to fight, to make things yield to you, to 
overcome, is it? Well, here is your foe. Sin, crouching like 
a wild beast at your heart's door, crouching in craven fear, 
ready to be subdued. Now fight it; it will yield to you; and 
you can work out your spiritual reaction, and reach the true 
expression of your manhood by the negative way, by the way 
of your own energetic spirit. Don't kill your brother; don't 
hate him; you need him for your work in the world; kill your 
sin. 

We cannot help sympathizing, to some extent, with the Cain 
t57pe of man. I think the Bible does. It puts the active, ro- 
bust, practical work of the world largely in their hands. On 
the other hand, with all its unworldly beauty, there is a note 
of the futile and premature in the opposite, the saintly and 
pious t5^e. Abel, his sweet life so soon and tragically 
quenched, was as little his brother's keeper as was Cain. 
Enoch, who "walked with God," lived out half his days, the 
world seemingly too bleak a climate for him, "and he was not, 
for God took him." Beautiful this; but all he did was to beget 
Methusaleh, whose sole distinction among men was to have 
existed longer than any other man that ever lived. There 
seems to be little if any robust reaction of spirit here; and as 



64 THE LIFE INDEED 

for Enoch, well, he was like Sir Gareth, the mly knight who 
won to the full sight of the holy grail: 

And one hath had the vision face to face, 
And now his chair desires him here in vain, 
However they may crown him otherwhere. 

There is something lacking in this strain of life too. 

This Enoch story brings us dimly to an old concept of life 
and death, which, because its conditions were so speedily over- 
turned, we can now neither prove nor disprove. It seems to 
point to what might have been the outcome of the Eden ex- 
istence, if man had never elected to take the fruit, that is, 
exercise his own initiative out of desire for knowledge. He 
was in a garden; tended like the plants, caged in strict regu- 
lations and unquestioning obedience, like the animals. Un- 
like the animals he had the power of initiative; its reward, to 
know good and evil, like God; its risk, to know hardship and 
death. He might have chosen the passive obedient state, and 
might have passed out of the earthly stage of existence not 
by death but as Enoch did. The animals have apparently little 
real fear and pain of death; he as the more highly evolved 
creature might normally have had still less, or have passed 
on like the chrysalis into the butterfly. But it would have been 
passing onward from a kind of vegetative life, a life passive 
instead of active, a life not cooperating intelligently with God, 
but as the unenterprising automaton of God. To exert his 
spirit, on the other hand, exposed him to deadly risk, nay to 
deadly certainty, — and he chose, virtually, for the sake of 
inheriting higher things, to take the risk. He would rather 
die knowing and originating action than as a passively moved 
thing. Was it worth the risk? It takes centuries to answer 
the question; but the freely chosen death of the Son of man, 
for love's sake, is the supreme answer. 

An immense interest there is in those naive old stories of 
Genesis, which embody the conception of how man's nature 
fares before he begins to write his laws on stone: the giants 
in the earth; the rising tide of wickedness; the clean sweep of 
the flood and new beginning; the Babel tower aspiring to 



THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 65 

heaven; then later Abraham the friend of God, dreaming of 
being a blessing to all the earth; and peaceful Isaac among 
his flocks; and Esau the surly, stupid, hungry hunter, whose 
high birthright carried with it no answering sense of noblesse 
oblige; and Jacob, with his rare combination of business 
shrewdness on the one side and intense devotion to the ideal 
on the other. But I must not linger with these old-world 
tales, full of meat though they are. Is it not clear by this 
time, that even in our twilight stratum of life that brooding 
kindly spirit of the beginning of things was neither taking 
a vacation nor working automatically? We see his work right 
where we ought to look for it, right where evolution becomes 
conscious and cooperative; in the answering spirit of man, 
which as it is warmed and lighted by the spirit of God comes 
forth from its germinant sleep, and rounds into individuality, 
and grows. Not always like Enoch or Abel, and sometimes 
sinking back almost to the abyss where, as Browning says, 

God unmakes but to remake the soul 
He else made j5.rst in vain; 

seldom failing, even in ruins to show, as Hamlet admiringly 
puts it, ^'his naked spirit, how majestical," or to prove, by 
negative vices as well as positive virtues, 

That life is not as idle ore, 

But iron dug from central gloom, 

And heated hot with burning fears. 

And dipt in baths of hissing tears. 
And batter'd with the shocks of doom 

To shape and use. 

There are strange and endlessly advancing combinations here, 
of deep action and reaction, of eternal and transitory, of 
worldly and other-worldly, of divine and human; and in them 
all, though universal law is establishing its domain, yet life 
too, the life of the free and joyous spirit, is surely coming 
step by step into the light. 



66 THE LIFE INDEED 



IV. THE BURDEN AND THE CRAVING 

I can only indicate now in briefest summary, what the tone 
and temper of life comes to be when man reaches the point 
where he writes his laws on stone, and is, for good or ill, be- 
yond that blessed immunity wherein, as St. Paul says, ''sin 
is not imputed where there is no law." I have named this the 
burden and the craving. Perhaps we can put it best in the 
songs that men sing; the musical outflow of a full and hopeful 
heart. There is no lack of such songs; we derive our own 
music still from the Hebrew Book of Psalms. In church the 
other day I heard the choir's closing anthem, ''I will sing of 
mercy and judgment"; and these words sum it all up, in one 
melodious utterance. The spirit of man, respond how it would 
to the law of manhood being, felt the need when the best was 
done of a forgiving mercy and gracious allowance; yet also 
felt that the best it could do was worthy enough to welcome 
the light of heaven upon it and abide the verdict, the verdict 
pronounced by the eternal court of God. Under these two 
ideas, mercy and judgment, we may sum up the spirit of man, 
in this twilight period when the outcome of life was still dim, 
as living and working. 

Let us imagine what must have been the mood engendered, 
the universal consciousness of things, when the growing sense 
of law had become the sense of an empire of law, a kind of at- 
mosphere enveloping the whole life and getting into the nerves 
and blood, a something that must be endured and observed, a 
something as natural as breathing. That is what the sense 
of the Hebrew world progressively became, before the coming 
of thrist. It has been called the night of legalism, during 
which men became more and more iron-bound and imprisoned, 
and less clearly cognizant of any outlet but final justice and 
retribution. It must have been, on the whole, an austere and 
tyrannous era. Not all could put it into words, but all could 
feel more or less heavily the immense burden of it; and while 
the more stolid spirits were mercifully spared the keen sense 



THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 67 

of it, with the finer spirits, like Job, the feeling of the arbi- 
trariness and essential iniquity of the world-order rose some- 
times to an agony of indignation and remonstrance. When we 
think how all-encompassing this atmosphere of law became, 
we almost wonder that men could sing at all. I sum up this 
felt dispensation in a word, as the spirit of man on the under 
side of things. It is the same dispensation that Professor 
Haeckel feels and blindly maintains in nature and material 
life, thinking of law as an automatic and self-acting thing. It 
amounts to the same, when, as with the Hebrews, the law is 
sensed as an empire wherein the spirit of man is subject to 
a Will imposed upon him from without, and only partially 
though growingly understood. 

Such a felt governance of things is certainly heroic treat- 
ment, as befits a being whose naked spirit is so majestical. 
Its effect in the large, according to his response to it, is one 
of two things: it makes him either a slave or an athlete. 

The sense of bondage, the feeling of being a slave, rises and 
grows, just as the realization of law, of its largeness and per- 
fectness and majesty, becomes more keen and ample. A simple 
personal command, to begin with, which its first recipients 
hardly took seriously, it grew and spread and covered the field 
of life, it penetrated inward and upward, until it became a 
thing unsearchable, unfathomable, impossible. If men had 
seen at the beginning what it would lead to, would they ever 
have committed themselves to it at all? Yet it was unes- 
capable; the very spirit within them impelled them to it as 
to a fate, giving such inner warning and counsel alike as was 
given to the aspiring knights of Arthur: 

For the King 
Will bind thee by such vows as is a shame 
A man should not be bound by, yet the which 
No man can keep. 

It is by such law as this, consented to all the while as holy 
and just and good, that men get the knowledge of sin. They 
develop, in fact, the strange consciousness that a man cannot 
but sin; that he is a depraved being, totally depraved, his 



68 THE LIFE INDEED 

heart deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. You 
remember that awful theological thesis which was the corner- 
stone of the late Professor Shedd's system: ''Sin a nature, and 
that nature guilt." Well, the same savage theology, fiercer 
even than Professor Shedd's, was maintained by the friends of 
Job; who, you remember, took that afflicted patriarch, perfect 
and upright as he was, and told him that he was being pun- 
ished not merely because he had sinned to deserve it, but be- 
cause, being a mortal, a man, he was so impure in the stand- 
ard of heaven, so innately crooked and depraved, that his 
utmost punishment was no more than he deserved, nay, was 
really too good for him. A strange situation this, for man's 
thoughts of his world to have reached. Yet they could not 
easily get round the logic of it, if they explored their law of 
being to its deeper spiritual involvements. It all rose, I think, 
from the growing sense that their law was so high and holy, 
and that at every step it had to encounter a law of sin in their 
members warring against it. "It is high, I cannot attain unto 
it," was the aspiring yet despairing song that they sang in the 
night. And along with this sense arose also the feeling that if 
ever they were to come out well at last they must have mercy 
accorded them; must transfer their utmost efforts from the 
sphere of strict justice to the sphere of forgiveness, allowance, 
mercy. What they came short must be made up by grace 
and compassion on the part of their Judge. You remember 
that they dared, in the face of this iron law, to cherish the 
ideal that came along with the law from Moses himself. ''The 
Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and 
abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, 
forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by 
no means acquit." Note that last clause: the Lord will never 
acquit a man, and say that he did not transgress when he did; 
the integrity of the law, the truth of things, must be eternally 
acknowledged; but He will forgive, will take the guilt as guilt, 
and cover it up with mercy. A sublime discovery this, is it 
not? the spirit of man rising so out of the darkness and slavery 
of law, and attaining to such light on the divine life. The 



THE TWILIGHT STRATUM 69 

light seemed to come from without, to be revealed; and we 
cannot say it was not and that men only thought so; but we 
can say there was light enough in the human spirit to meet it, 
and put it into words, and trust in it as a support in their 
empire of bondage and sacred slavery. 

But this felt governance of law was also developing the 
athlete: the man who felt he could obey it, and get it thor- 
oughly into his blood and life, and live up to it. The man 
perfect and upright, whose savage friends so misjudged him, 
was strong, you remember, to maintain his integrity, to assert 
it in the face of God, nay, even to call God to account in the 
interest of the Godlike and compel Him to revise His law; 
you remember too how Job's last word, before death ushered 
him, or as he thought would usher him, before the dread judg- 
ment seat, was that of lifting up the clean record of his life 
on his shoulder, w^hich he would bear before the throne like 
a prince. What a picture of the life athlete this is ! And there 
must have been many holy souls who took up their burden 
of law, not as men overworked and heavy-laden, but like the 
strong man rejoicing to run a race. They w^ere eager to com- 
mit themselves to such heroic treatment of law for the good, 
and the strength, and the growth, and the fibre of discipline, 
that they saw in it. Read the one hundred and nineteenth 
psalm, that unique panegyric of law, that joyful acceptance 
of all its phases, if you want to understand the mind of the 
spiritual athlete; it is a truer picture of the grand old regime, 
I am sure, than the savage logic of the friends of Job. Think 
too how lovingly and thoroughly the Hebrews extended the 
application of their law; even beyond their scripture text 
into the minute enactments of rabbinism and Pharisaism; 
hungry, as it were, to make its sphere absolute, extending to 
every smallest duty of life; until when our Lord came He 
found it top-heavy and unwieldy with the traditions of the 
elders. This may have engendered hypocrisy and all sorts of 
external observance; but think what a vigor of loyalty and 
obedience must have underlain; think too that such a regime 
could produce a Saul of Tarsus, who even in the new freedom 



70 THE LIFE INDEED 

of his Christian consciousness could still be proud of having 
walked in all the ordinances of the law, blameless. Yes: the 
sense of law had also its tonic and joyful side; it was not all 
bondage and slavery. 

You will notice just here, too, that judgment in the Old 
Testament is not a thing to cower before and dread, as if 
man, conscious of having his fling now, or perhaps his stum- 
blings and mistakes, were some day to catch it, as we say, and 
take his punishment. Judgment was a thing that men longed 
for, called for; as an athlete, who knows that he has played a 
good game, wants the truth to appear, and calls out to the 
umpire, ''Judgment!" ''Judge me, O Lord, for I have walked 
in mine integrity," is the Psalmist's prayer. It could be of- 
fered only by one who felt that on the whole he had done 
well, had observed the law of his being; and was not only 
willing to abide by the award, whatever it was, but eager to 
know more accurately what is the high standard of things. 

For always, with the athlete and the slave alike, there is 
the sense that man is yet incomplete, that what he does and 
sees is still only partial, immature, far behind the ideal; hence 
his craving for judgment, for the pronouncing of things as 
they are; and that some such day of light will come, when 
the worn and sinful slave of law shall have attained to what 
men call salvation, which is only another name for health and 
undiseased manhood; well, there is not wanting some glim- 
mering of the idea that life will one day be more than work 
and wages, more than mere judgment on what has been; 
though in this twilight stratum the light is still dim, only a 
faint streak above the eastern hills. It is like Tennyson's 
outlook from his gruesome Vision of Sin: 

At last I heard a voice upon the slope 
Cry to the summit, "Is there any hope?" 
To which an answer peal'd from that high land, 
But in a tongue no man could understand; 
And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn 
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn. 



Ill 

NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 

WHAT GLEAMS OF NOBLER PROMISE APPEAR AS THE 
SOUL APPROACHES ITS MAJORITY 

I. The End of the Cosmic Tether 
II, On the Frontier of Adult Life 
III. The Soul of Prophecy 



Ill 

NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 

A DISCOVERY on which the late John Fiske prided 
himself not a little, giving him, as it so far forth 
did, original and not merely spokesman rights in 
the goodly fellowship of the evolutionists, Spencer and Huxley 
and Darwin, was the discovery of the relative length of the 
period of infancy in man and the lower animals. It was Mr. 
Fiske who set forth the important fact that animals have a 
shorter and less helplessly dependent infancy in proportion as 
they have a less complex life to evolve. Man, as compared 
with the whole domain of animal life below him, has so much 
more to learn, so much wider relations to adjust himself to, 
and especially in exploring that new region of intellect and 
reason which it is his special business to evolve, not only be- 
gins life more helplessly but remains callow and immature 
longer than any other living creature. He comes eventually 
to more, but he has more, infinitely more, to come to. We 
can then, to some extent, measure the worth and dignity of 
his life, as compared with that of his fellow-animals, by the 
amount of time he must take to get his vital powers in working 
order and arrive at the fulness of them. It is his relative 
greatness that makes the difference. 

The analogy still holds good, or rather it is not an analogy 
at all but continues a literal fact, when we enter that higher 
stadium of life wherein the spirit is waking from its preex- 
istent torpor and learning in a sort of crude, halting, embry- 
onic way to react wisely on its world of manhood law. If it 
takes twenty-one years for man in this existence to traverse 
childhood and youth and come to his majority, how much 
longer must it take proportionally for the human spirit to 

73 



74 th:e life indeed 

shape itself to the majestic model of the world to come, so 
that when finally man enters upon his full heritage he may 
enter as an adult, and as a prince to the manner born? Four 
thousand years, according to Archbishop Usher's scripture 
chronology, was the period of man's spiritual infancy, or per- 
haps we ought even to say embryonic life; it took all those 
millenniums of bondage and twilight before St. Paul could say, 
"When the fulness of the time was come." Evidently, then, 
that must have been a great thing for which such long growth 
and maturing was needed; we do not half realize its greatness 
yet. 

I have chosen for purposes of our exposition to call this old 
legal dispensation not a period or era but a stratum; and in 
the deepest sense this is what it is. Instead of saying there 
was a time, we may just as truly say there is a stratum of 
manhood life, of your life and mine, from which there is no 
outlook but dimness and bondage. But the Scripture puts this 
before us as history, to which we can apply our historic 
methods of study, and see its elements actually at work. There 
was also a time, which from obscure beginnings swept up grad- 
ually through increasing foregleams and clearness to the ful- 
ness of the time. Just as we figure heaven as both a state 
and a place, so this immortal manhood of ours is set before us 
both as an inner spirit and as a development, an evolution, in 
the care of the hours and the years; and what takes place in 
one takes place in the other. By the careful study of the 
time, then, we may get a growing idea of that essentially time- 
less life within us. The years of the world are man's re- 
source, his opportunity, his mercy. 

Wait: my faith is large in Time, 
And that which shapes it to some perfect end. 

But what was the trend of this long time, this four thousand 
year period, during which the great blind unwieldy world of 
manhood was creeping upward to the goal of which finally it 
could be said. Here is the culmination, the fulness? This is 
the question that we are undertaking, as guided by Scripture, 



NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 75 

to answer. We have seen a little of its beginning; at which, 
like a hapless child, man did not take the law of his being seri- 
ously enough, and found as his first discovery that it was 
woven with the nature of things and had power to hurt him. 
We have seen him then taking the worldly tasks and achieve- 
ments of it so seriously, and so with an eye to self-expression, 
that he ignored the gentle claims of his brother, — could not 
consent to live and let live too. We see him then becoming 
immersed in the affairs of this life, with its call for order and 
adjustment and human institutions; immersed in them as if 
they were all there is, and as if like the man with the muck- 
rake he could look no way but downward. But all this while 
there was his endowment of the spirit, and even the combina- 
tions it made with worldly things were not animal alone, and 
not merely intellectual, but blindly spiritual, and therefore 
elemental. It penetrated inward, away from the mere demands 
of the body and its world, inward and dimly upward, until it 
stood on the frontier of the world to come, which also was the 
frontier of its own adult life. Its approaching heaven was also 
its approaching manhood, wherein all its powers could be sure 
of themselves, and wise, and worthy of manhood responsibility. 
The countless reactions of the human spirit, through the long 
twilight, worked together toward this result, until at length 
the fulness of the time was near, and the coming dawn was 
brightening the eastern horizon. 

It would be very charming, doubtless, to go on describing 
all this in poetic imagery; and it has already been abundantly 
reasoned out in systems of theology. What we want now, 
however, while not abjuring all that we can get from these, are 
the large and literal facts of the case. What was the reality 
of things, as a growing evolutionary fact? I have tried to 
make a beginning on our definition of the spirit, the active 
power of it all; but as you are aware, I could get only a little 
way, and I warned you as much. It still has an ocean of the 
unknown behind it, and man has to find himself out, by slow 
degrees, as he goes along. Meanwhile a curious old text in 
Proverbs haunted me, and I looked it up in the concordance; 



76 THE LIFE INDEED 

here it is, it may serve to give our idea another clarifying ele- 
ment. "The spirit of man," says this proverb, "is the candle 
of the Lord, searching all the inward parts of the body." Does 
it not seem strange that the Bible, so jealous as it is for the 
claims of the divine, did not turn this right round, saying that 
the spirit of the Lord is the candle that searches the inward 
parts. This latter is doubtless true, as we should find if we 
went back far enough; but both things, it would seem, are 
true, each in its place; for the human candle was lighted at 
the sun. The proverb calls up in turn a remark of St. Paul's. 
"For what man," says he, "knoweth the things of a man, save 
the spirit of man which is in him?" This is what we are after: 
the things of a man, the growing complex of things mounting 
up to the summit of manhood. Is it not reassuring then to 
know, and on scripture assertion, that this elemental spirit of 
manhood, apart from an arbitrary or mystic revelation, is en- 
dowed with a kind of radio-active light which is candle enough 
to light our way, if we will give it fair and adequate heed? 

Of the conscious interaction of this spirit of man with the 
spirit of God, which latter we are thinking of in scientific 
terms as the eternal evolution spirit, and which the Hebrews 
suggestively name the spirit of Jehovah, Him who is, the time 
will come to speak; we cannot take this up now. It is more 
to our present purpose to note, that when St. Paul announces 
the fulness of the time, the beginning of what he elsewhere 
calls the dispensation of the fulness of times, he connects it 
with the coming of One to whom was given the spirit without 
measure. We simply note this fact also here; not concerned 
at present with the question how much more He was than 
man, how much too high for our manhood to compass. 
Enough for us that in the same passage St. Paul takes special 
pains to make Him out true man, "made of a woman, made 
under the law," that is, an authentic product of the evolution 
we are tracing. He is squarely and honestly in the line; that 
is to say, transcendent as we all own Him to be. His appear- 
ance on earth is not catastrophic but evolutionary, not an 
unmotived irruption from without, but the culmination of 



NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME yy 

forces working within, such powers as are germinant in you 
and me and may be traced by the little candle which our ele- 
mental being already carries. This fulness of the time that 
we are nearing, — some call it the coming of the Son of man, 
some call it the coming of the Son of God; both theological 
ideas, hard to fathom. But of one thing we are assured, and 
it is to be tested on the ground not merely of theological con- 
ception but of scientific, evolutionary fact: that this fulness 
of the time was the mark of rounded, matured, adult manhood. 
If this has also elements of the supernatural, let us at least 
deal honestly by them; the candle that is in us will, I hope, 
enable us to see things as they are. 



I. THE END OF THE COSMIC TETHER 

Standing now on the upper edge of this twilight stratum of 
life, where we can look back over the way we have traversed, 
and forward toward what the manhood soul has come to desire 
and anticipate, what is the scenery of things, what is the spirit 
of man beginning to discern and demand? 

Well, to begin with, I am reckless enough here to quote 
again that naughty man, George Bernard Shaw, who I think 
with all his posturing and wrong-headedness is really pounding 
at a big idea. "We have seen," he says, "that as Man grows 
through the ages, he finds himself bolder by the growth of his 
spirit (if I may so name the unknown) and dares more and 
more to love and trust instead of to fear and fight. But his 
courage has other effects : he also raises himself from mere con- 
sciousness to knowledge by daring more and more to face facts 
and tell himself the truth. For in his infancy of helplessness 
and terror he could not face the inexorable, and facts being of 
all things the most inexorable, he masked all the threatening 
ones as fast as he discovered them ; so that now every mask re- 
quires a hero to tear it off. The king of terrors. Death, was 
the Arch-Inexorable: Man could not bear the dread of that 
thought. He must persuade himself that Death could be pro- 
pitiated, circumvented, abolished. How he fixed the mask of 



78 THE LIFE INDEED 

immortality on the face of Death for this purpose we all know. 
And he did the like with all disagreeables as long as they re- 
mained inevitable. Otherwise he must have gone mad with 
terror of the grim shapes around him^ headed by the skeleton 
with the scythe and hour-glass. The masks were his ideals, 
as he called them; and what, he would ask, would life be 
without ideals? Thus he became an idealist, and remained 
so until he dared to begin pulling the masks off and looking 
the spectres in the face — dared, that is, to be more and more 
a realist. But all men are not equally brave; and the greatest 
terror prevailed whenever some realist bolder than the rest 
laid hand on a mask which they did not yet dare to do with- 
out." 

Of all the scripture men who dared to pull the mask of con- 
ventional ideal off from the face of facts, the boldest, the 
most uncompromising, and accordingly the hardest to accept, 
is the Hebrew sage who calls himself Koheleth, or Ecclesiastes. 
His book stands just at the nodal point of the Old Dispensa- 
tion, where the so-called night of legalism is darkest and most 
prevaiHng, and where, influenced by the self-pleasing Greek 
philosophy, men are beginning to dream of escape into the 
sweet lubber-land of immortality. Being, if we except the 
author of Job, the only real philosopher who has invaded the 
Bible scheme of life, we look to him with keen interest to see 
what kind of a fist a dyed-in-the-wool Hebrew will make at 
philosophizing. But we find him not so much a philosopher 
as a kind of pioneer scientist; he does not speculate at all, but 
just searches the world for cold hard facts, not blinking the 
bitter and disagreeable things, or trying to solve the insoluble. 
His one hungry desire is to see things as they are; his su- 
preme resolve not to cheat himself with glamours or specious 
excuses. The voluble vaticinations of immortality around him, 
and the flood of idle words ^'about it and about" irritate him; 
for in the prevailing crookedness of things he is well aware 
that there is not underlying fibre enough of character to make 
a real backbone for such tremendous presage. So his self- 
appointed business is to tear the masks off from the facts of 



HEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 79 

life, to be a realist; and if all is vanity, ''weary, stale, flat, and 
unprofitable," to own it without fancy or flinching. 

Now if this is true, or in so far as it is true, the world can- 
not afford not to know it and govern itself accordingly. And 
indeed there are moods of men, and strains of contemplation, 
wherein Koheleth's words come with all the force of iron con- 
viction. Of course they do not set forth the only facts in the 
world, but only the facts that nucleate round some one point 
of view. We must ask of them therefore. On what principle 
are they true, in accord with what presuppositions are they 
true? And looking into Koheleth's book for his presuppo- 
sitions, we find a great truth, namely, that he has reached to 
the deadlock of life, where he perceives that the old scheme of 
things is worn out, and the new not yet ready to appear. In 
other words, from his point of view manhood has reached the 
end of the cosmic tether; has gone as far in the resources of 
life as this world and this world's ways will let him; has used 
up his available vitality, so to say, in adjusting his soul to 
this prevailing empire of law, and has none left over to col- 
onize a new world and rise from height to height in a new 
life. This is the deep ground of his strange indictment of 
things; all his book flows out of this, and all its abysmal sad- 
ness. 

He begins with the world of nature and of man as man; 
for in his ponderings his imagination has become enlarged 
enough to overflow the Jewish nation and its parish affairs, 
the Mosaic dispensation and its austere legalism, that magni- 
fied law of the species in which the Hebrews have imprisoned 
their sympathies. His consciousness has become cosmic; for 
him the empire of law has become universal. And wherever 
law works it exhibits the same traits. It is not a forward- 
moving thing but a thing restraining and regulative; a rou- 
tine, a treadmill, a huge wheel of being and fate, which, when 
it has come round full circle, simply starts again, with nothing 
new under the sun to show for its labored revolution. The 
next generation is like this, just as tomorrow's sun runs the 
same course as to-day's, just as the wind whirleth and con- 



8o THE LIFE INDEED 

tinually, and the sea^ never full, returns to its sources in the 
mountains. And for all the world is so full of labor, yet it 
all passes soon and is forgotten. Then there is death, at once 
a spectre and a hard concrete fact, coming untimely to end it 
all, for man and beast, wise and fool, alike. So this treadmill 
is virtually a prison, with no apparent release to larger life, 
but only the opening of the cell to the gallows and the grave. 
In a word, here in this law-enslaved world Koheleth misses 
the element of progress and uprise; its ongoings do not seem, 
as we say, to be motived; the race of men labors but does 
not clearly accomplish a work. There is a lack of wages, of 
profit, of surplusage, to crown the life that man expends so 
lavishly. He can get his fill, in money and luxury and fame; 
but what is it all when he has got it? Reckoning up the net 
proceeds of living, on this plane and scale, — what is it all 
worth, and where the profit? 

Yet there it is, the inexorable fact: law, law, everywhere; 
cause and effect, sowing and reaping, work and wages, the 
wheel never still. You can imagine what this enlarged con- 
sciousness of things must be, when it gets into the blood and 
nerves of a soul big enough to realize it. It does not drive 
him mad or pessimistic as it does so many, the Nietzsches and 
the Schopenhauers and the Ibsens; for his heart is big, and as 
he expresses it, he keeps his wisdom on top; he is concerned 
all the while, if not to escape it, yet to bear it manfully and 
make the best of it. This is his real attitude to things. He 
will look facts in the face, flinching not before the last and 
sternest fact of all; he will tell himself the truth; and then he 
will adjust himself to it. Something good must come, we may 
be sure, from such an attitude. 

Yet when he turns from great nature and the wheel of being, 
which, though a grinding routine, is at least uniform, equable, 
calculable, and looks into the world of human affairs, a new 
and puzzling element meets him. Something there is, as we 
say, queering the game; turning the machinery askew, so that 
it sometimes works in reverse order. "Lo, this only have I 
found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought 



NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 8i 

out many inventions." Ah^ we begin to see what this disturb- 
ing element is: it is the spirit of man, acting on its own ac- 
count, and capable of acting at cross purposes. If it cannot 
escape the law of being, yet, being shrewd and cunning, it can 
interpret, and accommodate, and in many ways evade. Hence 
the oppressions that are wrought under the sun, and the deadly 
competitions and rivalries; hence the cynical disregard of the 
poor and helpless, and the crowding of the under man to the 
wall; hence the cry of the laborer and the sneer of the capi- 
talist; hence the hypocrisy and falseness that creep even into 
the house of God. We all know how it is and has been. I 
was reading the other day in Conan Doyle's story of Sir Nigel 
how things were even in sacred precincts as late as 1348 years 
after Christ. In a conversation between the Abbot of Wa- 
verley and his sacristan, the inquiry is made why the young 
Nigel has committed certain depredations. 

"Because [says the sacristan] he hates the House of Waverley, holy father; 
because he swears that we hold his father's land." 

"In which there is surely some truth." 

"But, holy father, we hold no more than the law has allowed." 

"True, brother, and yet between ourselves, we may admit that the heavier 
purse may weigh down the scales of Justice. . . . Well, well, the law is 
the law, and if you can use it to hurt it is still lawful to do so. ... I will 
teach him that the servants of Holy Church, even though we of the rule 
of St. Bernard be the lowliest and humblest of her children, can still defend 
their own against the froward and the violent!" 

This is a novelist's tale, perhaps you say, and printed in a 
Sunday paper at that; let us not use it to prove actual facts. 
Well, let us turn to the present, wherein supposedly the keen 
brain of society is working to devise remedies and punishments 
for the iniquities of men; to the present and to actual fact. 
In a recent editorial on an unspeakable horror which has come 
to light, I read: 

There are times when punishments imposed by man-made laws must ever 
seem grotesquely inadequate to secure exact justice to all who are concerned 
in crime. Moral guilt and legal guilt often are not measured by the same 
standards, and punishments get hopelessly astray. 

All this, modern as it is, fits in to Koheleth's picture 
of the puzzling welter of things on the old law standard; it 



82 THE LIFE INDEED 

is not of a day, but of all time. ''God hath made man upright; 
but they have sought out many inventions." The spirit of 
man, reacting on its complex world, gets sadly tangled up with 
the laws of things; defines them frowardly or crudely; so that 
whether he is seeking selfish advantage or strict justice, he 
makes a mess of it. It looks, does it not, as if the poet's words 
had got to come to pass : 

Ere she gain her Heavenly-best, a God must mingle with the game. 

You remember how this same poet's Koheleth mood almost 
got the better of him in his old age, as this same welter of 
things took deeper possession of his imagination: 

What is all of it worth? 

What the philosophies, all the sciences, poesy, varying voices of prayer? 
All that is noblest, all that is basest, all that is filthy with all that is fair? 

What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom, or a moment's anger of bees in 
their hive? 

The fact is, — and Job as well as Koheleth is beginning to dis- 
cover it, — a world in which there is only law and justice, 
arbitrary Will and unchosen submission, work and wage, 
barter and profit; a world in which, from the deeps of nature 
to the heights of reason, there are only these for the majestic 
spirit of man to react upon, is only half a world. There is a 
whole hemisphere of being yet to enter, a hemisphere in which 
alone, if anywhere, are the ultimate powers adequate to bring 
these tangled laws into shape and order. No jot or tittle can 
pass from law till all is fulfilled; but — it must be fulfilled, 
it must bear its fruit of righteousness and justice. And this 
it is not doing, with only these elements available; the spirit 
of man, that unconscionable marplot, has utterly queered the 
game. And so far as that age can see, the end of the cosmic 
tether is reached; there seems no room for anything beyond. 
Is it any wonder that Koheleth sternly puts away the dream 
of immortality, seeing as he does only these confused materials 
to make an immortality out of? He will not tell himself a 
lie; and his distinction, sad yet strong, is, that he will not look 



NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 83 

at futurity through a hole or through idle speculations; he is 
determined to work and wait. 

All this, you will say, looks like anything but nearing the 
fulness of the time. It looks rather, if such fulness is coming, 
like the darkest hour before the dawn. This, indeed, is just 
what it is; and is not this something? Is it not something for 
the spirit of man so to have outgrown its environment, as to 
feel that the potencies of the old order are exhausted? When 
we reach the point where we can define our world, define it 
and put the full stop to it, we already stand on the upper fron- 
tier of it; it is below us, albeit played-out and dead; and we, 
as Maeterlinck phrases it, have secured the foothold where- 
from to take flight into life. This is something; this is a great 
deal. The spirit of man has yet his true history to write; all 
heretofore has been but a blind welter, as it were the auto- 
matic and reflex motions of an embryo, and we cannot rightly 
interpret their uses until we can see them working out the 
rudiments of greater things. 

For we are Ancients of the earth, 
And in the morning of the times. 

And even to this twilight stratum, in its darkest hour, the 
morning is surely drawing near. 

II. ON THE FRONTIER OF ADULT LIFE 

Our thought of the end of the cosmic tether, a tether which 
the spirit of man strains at and stretches but cannot break, 
has revealed to us the negative side of the case ; and by tearing 
the mask off the facts of life has disclosed strange discordant 
powers working there, working crudely, blindly, and sometimes 
in inverse order. It remains now to look at the positive and 
upbuilding side of things; to see what elements of solid worth 
and insight the spirit of man has attained to, now that he has 
traversed the dim childish tract of life, and stands on the 
frontier of adult manhood. We can by this means get a clearer 
notion of how truly he is nearing the fulness of the time. 



84 THE LIFE INDEED 

Mr. Shaw, in the passage I have quoted above, seems to 
make great virtue of tearing off masks, and looking the facts of 
the world in the face. He is drawing up a case of forewarned, 
forearmed; is not that all we need: to see things as they are, 
the bitter and gruesome things, the inexorable things; and to 
adjust our spiritual reaction and attitude to them? Realism 
— that is the thing; to his mind it is the business of the grow- 
ing spirit to outgrow these fond or fearful idealistic dreams. 
But have you noticed that the spirit of man cannot bear more 
than a certain limited amount of pure realism? See how it 
works in literature, which you know is the spirit of man put- 
ting itself into words and figures. Notice, for one thing, how 
sure realism is, in its report of life, to steer either for the dis- 
agreeable and dirty facts, as in Zola, or for the commonplace 
and humdrum facts, as in Howells and his school. Then for 
another thing notice that realism lacks the tonic element; it 
sees things as they are on its own plane, but it does not see 
with hope and uplift; the thing that it detects behind the mask 
is after all its own image, and the gospel it preaches is the 
gospel of the fox that cut off its tail and wanted all other foxes 
to experience the joy of taillessness. But for some reason 
great Nature had given the fox a tail, a fine bushy member, 
as it would seem, to make use of. A feeling like this comes by 
a sure reaction betimes in literature; men get tired of unre- 
lieved realism and take refuge in the wildest, most impossible 
romance. All this is not an idle figure, it is human nature. 
Men cannot bear the onesidedness of seeing things as they are; 
their true desire is to see things as they ought to be. It is 
in us to dream; all the sleeping half of our life, when the will 
is quiescent and recruiting its powers, is spent in the mysteri- 
ous land of dreams. Then add to this fact the strenuous He- 
brew view: ^We are saved by hope: but hope that is seen — 
that is, realism — is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth 
he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then 
do we with patience wait for it." In other words, it won't do, 
it is not in man to outgrow idealism. Idealism has its prac- 
tical work in life; our whole salvation, our buoyant health of 



NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 85 

soul, is dependent on it, is bound up in hoping for that we see 
not. "Where there is no vision/' says the proverb, "the people 
perish," or as I think the word more accurately means, they 
are let loose and let down. And that is the certain result of 
unrelieved realism. 

An ideal has been dimly growing, and rounding feature by 
feature into definiteness, all through this twilight period; like 
the pattern wrought from the wrong side of some rich tapestry. 
It is the ideal of free, unimpeded, undictated, self-directive 
manhood. Men are getting the feeling that they have been 
governed long enough from some remote and unseen capital 
outside; they want home rule; they want the seat of govern- 
ment in their own hearts. Even the poor work they make in 
administering the laws of their being, nay even their impulse 
to accommodate and pervert and evade these, but serves to 
intensify this feeling. The ideal is knocking loudly at the 
doors; it will take no denial. We may focus this ideal, per- 
haps, in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson: "He may be a 
man, in short, acting on his own instincts, keeping in his own 
shape that God made him in; and not a mere crank in the 
social engine-house, welded on principles that he does not un- 
derstand, and for purposes that he does not care for." If this 
rightly expresses the deep consciousness to which the spirit 
of man has grown, now that he is nearing the fulness of the 
time, we can realize what a marvelous road of advance he has 
traversed, since Moses, with his new-made law, took him at 
the edge of the wilderness and said, "Ye shall not do after all 
the things that we do here this day, every man whatsoever is 
right in his own eyes." Yet this advance connotes no spirit 
of rebellion or evasion; that is the ennobling feature of it. 
He is getting ready now, at last, to do whatsoever is right in 
his own eyes, because by a long and beneficent though stren- 
uous education, he has come to identify this with what is right 
in the eyes of God. It is by no means for nothing, or for a 
small thing, that he has had his protracted schooling in the 
ideal of duty — what is due, to God, himself, and his world, 
— and of righteousness, rightness, straightness, the square 



86 THE LIFE INDEED 

deal. He is ready now to take up that supreme ideal, holi- 
ness, the whole man, acting out his adult, self-directive nature. 
Here is where St. Paul's idea of the true function of law 
comes in, what law is really for in the evolving order of things. 
''The law," he says, "was our schoolmaster, to bring us to 'the 
point where' we might be justified," that is, secure and em- 
body justice, righteousness, manhood, "by faith." What faith 
means, we shall discuss later. The word, pedagogue, her trans- 
lated schoolmaster, does not mean a teacher, nor a master ex- 
cept in limited sense; it was the word used to designate 
a servant of the house, usually a slave, whose duty it was to 
conduct the growing boy to and from the public school, so 
that without molestation or truancy he might be in the way 
of getting his real education in life elsewhere. You can see 
then what the word connotes. It recognizes the fact that the 
child is yet a child: immature, without fully-formed judgment 
or trained impulse, still looking up and learning, still under 
the law of enforced obedience to tutors and governors. The 
law, St. Paul says, was our pedagogue, our childhood guardian. 
And the man, though with all the potencies of manhood grow- 
ing within him, is still a minor, not yet self-directive, not yet 
treated as an adult, not yet ready to take the helm of life into 
his own hands. He must be led, must submit to leading up to 
the last moment, yet led in such a way that when the clock 
strikes he may be trusted to take the helm and not wreck him- 
self. When the time comes he must be ready; that sacred trust 
of freedom, of fully developed personality, must find in him a 
worth and a ripeness so ingrained that his life thenceforth 
shall not be a wild anarchy, or a weak failure, or a base re- 
version to dissipation and animalism. A great thing it is, this 
educative stage, wherein he must follow his pedagogue and be 
under tutors and governors. It is the stage in which, before 
he is held fully responsible for mistakes and errors, while he 
yet has the immunities and merciful allowances accorded to 
a minor, he can train himself in the motions and habitudes of 
manhood, the elements of freedom. The servant is to become 
an heir and a son; and he who in his dealings with his em-^ 



NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 87 

pire of law felt the sinews of strength is to become an athlete 
and a victor. 

Now as I have just said, this schoolmaster or pedagogue, in 
St. Paul's view, was not a teacher, nor in the essential sense 
a master. He was only a guardian, to lead to school, to pro- 
tect and defend. We do not get our education then, it seems, 
from law: this storing up of wisdom toward adult life comes 
otherwise. What then is the source of our education? Again 
we must have recourse to our constant term, which by this 
time, you will think, is growing monotonous. It is the spirit 
of man, reacting on his world of experience, and forming there- 
from usages and ideals. The spirit of man we last con- 
templated as a kind of marplot, invading the equable and 
calculable reign of law and queering the game by all sorts of 
inventions and perversions. But that reaction of the spirit 
comes only when the law is felt as an alien element, only when 
there is lack of or imperfect sympathy with it. And that is 
one of the limitations of childhood and youth ; even to the date 
of his majority, to his twenty-first birthday, the young man 
has wisdom yet to learn, so truly so indeed that until then the 
laws of men do not fully trust him. And all this while the 
spirit of man has other uses than to evade and accommodate 
the terms of living; other and higher wisdom than to tear off 
masks and look the sordid facts in the face. Youth is the fa- 
vored time for ideals, the time for mounting and abounding 
vigor to aspire forward and create new worlds. And after all 
it is only a side-line, only a negative thing, that it should lay 
out strength and wisdom at cross purposes with the order of 
things. More truly, more fundamentally, the youth of man- 
hood is laying out its strength, according to its growing wis- 
dom, in manliness. It is coming to see the law of its being as 
not iniquitous and bungling but as holy and just and good. It 
is gradually working the law m, to the tissues of its being, into 
bone and red blood and muscle, so that when the hour of ma- 
jority comes this shall be no longer the expression of an alien 
Will imposed from without, but what St. Paul calls the law of 
the spirit of life. 



88 THE LIFE INDEED 

I cannot dwell on this idea longer here; though it opens up 
many vistas of conduct and noble training and broadening 
horizons of being. Another time will come to speak of the 
spiritual athlete, training his muscles to sure and harmonious 
action, and as he approaches adult manhood rejoicing as a 
strong man to run a race. Here I will speak of only one 
thing more. We sometimes see the disagreeable youth, the 
loafer, who has learned to smoke and swear, and whose atti- 
tude to all things fine and noble is bumptious, sneering, 
cynical. But such a phenomenon of life impresses us as patho- 
logical; it is not a health of manhood but a disease; its course 
is downward, and if it survives from youth to age becomes 
disgusting and melancholy indeed. To lose reverence for 
things above us, to lose the capacity of wonder and worship, 
is the great disaster of growing life. But you will have noticed 
one thing that in the progress of this twilight period man did 
seem to lose; and that was the sense of God's nearness. Enoch 
walked with God, and he was not, for God took him; Abraham 
talked with God at the door of his tent; Moses, the pioneer of 
law, saw God as did no man after him, face to face. But 
these things were one mark of infancy, when men had to cling 
to the arm and word of God for everything they did. When 
they got along far enough to see and explore their being's law, 
the person of God began to become remote; He was progres- 
sively thought of as a Being throned off somewhere out of 
sight, and out of our active life. And in the place of this talk- 
ing face to face there came a sense of distance which wrought 
to develop a feeling of reverence; for God was no longer on 
our childish level but high, infinitely high above us. You re- 
member how Koheleth rebukes the chattering empty-headed 
fools of his day, who brought their unseemly sacrifice of words 
to the house of God: "God is in heaven and thou upon earth, 
therefore let thy words be few." Is this then a reversion, an 
evolution of the spirit of man backward and away from the 
spirit of God? Not so. The spirit is by such process striking 
in, becoming more deeply and wisely ingrained in life and man- 
hood. Browning has a striking idea, that God's way with man 



NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 89 

is to let him go, put him a little away from Himself, in order 
that man may have the chance to try his powers and learn 
what he is made of. It is a true idea; we see it working here 
at the frontier of adult life, working in the very fact that the 
consciousness of God has become pale and remote. For along 
with it the consciousness of life and its claims is becoming 
larger, nobler, more knit with the fibres of being. And though 
his wisdom comes to discern that he is at the end of the cosmic 
tether, yet the tether is not broken, nor can it be; his very 
sense of greatness, and of readiness to emerge from the under 
side of things but ministers a greater reverence; reverence 
both for God and for the boundless potencies of manhood law. 
So even in the sense that he must obey the law of Hfe, the 
Being from whom the decree ultimately came forth is really 
nearer than ever, in his mouth and in his heart. 

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 

So near is God to man, 
WTien Duty whispers low, "Thou must" 

The youth replies "/ can." 

I can; think how truly we are on the frontier of adult life 
when we can look upward and forward and say, ''I can." The 
hour of our spiritual majority is all ready to strike. 

III. THE SOUL OF PROPHECY 

"I will sing of mercy and judgment." I wonder if we 
realize how great the boon was to the striving, stumbling, 
dim-eyed, wrong-headed humanity of the old dispensation, that 
they cotdd raise such a song; that in this rigid empire of law, 
always exacting its stern tribute of righteousness, there was 
let down, as it were, over the hearts of men the protecting 
aegis of mercy, compassion, long-suffering, generous allowance. 
Consider the case once more. Here was the creative Power 
of the world manifesting His work and purpose; manifesting 
it first of all in simple power; the same revelation which the 
naturalists and scientists of to-day are so desperately trying 
to trace, the same unity of design and interrelation which is 



90 THE LIFE INDEED 

sweeping upward to include in its purview everything that is, 
the head and heart of creation, as well as its hands and its 
hidden automatic energies. The idea of law is this Creative 
Power's first and fundamental word; the rubric under which, 
however our thoughts enlarge, we must realize the comprehen- 
sive oneness of things. And yet, as soon as we get high enough 
in the scale to traverse the conscious stratum of evolution, 
where we can begin to cooperate in the design, we become 
aware how inevitable is a certain crookedness in things, which 
keeps back the law, the manhood law especially, from its free 
and full course. We learn this by our own human experience, 
the law in our members which, even when we would do good, 
makes evil to be present with us; so that like Paul, when the 
sense of it comes upon us unrelieved, we cry out, ^'0 wretched 
man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this 
death?" This cry is not a fiction of Christian doctrine; it 
is the cry of the human, as man finds the meaning of his na- 
ture and situation in the world. And now consider how much 
it means that he can sing of an order of things wherein is not 
only a Power that works but a Heart that waits; waits for 
better and truer things, and meanwhile has mercy, and makes 
allowance. The consciousness of that is what keeps the old 
Hebrew mind sane, enabling it to do its work manfully and 
cheerfully, in spite of a broken law of being. 

You may perhaps have noticed, ere this, that whenever I 
have come in sight of what is called the problem of evil I have 
merely glanced at it and gone on my way. That problem, you 
know, has been the great puzzle of theology; to the untheolo- 
gized world too, it has in like manner stood in the way as a 
fated mystery, an insoluble enigma. Why man, the highest 
product of evolution, should be capable of the lowest degrada- 
tion, should have in him the ability, nay the tendency, to wreck 
his manhood by sin, is as hard a nut for science to crack as 
for theology. Must it remain, then, the impenetrable secret 
of being, an eternal barrier to the uprise of the highest created 
thing? I have not avoided it because I would evade it or 
belittle it; I have kept it for the place in which we could bring 



HEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 91 

the most elements which make for solution to bear upon it. 
Nor would I, even now, set my humble self up to clarify what 
has so long puzzled the doctors; I wish merely to mention the 
contribution which I think this stage of our study makes to 
it. Sin, we note, is a discount and an evil which goes along 
with an empire of law; it is an element of the twilight stratum 
of manhood; in fact, it is by the law, as St. Paul tells us, that 
the knowledge of sin comes, and sin is not imputed where 
there is no law. Yet by the side of sin, in the foul midst of 
sin, and emphasized even more than its presence, is always 
brought to light this element of gracious allowance and forgive- 
ness. ^'The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long- 
suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy 
for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin;" 
this is the burden of the old revelation, insisted on at such 
length and fulness, before the addition is made, ''and that will 
by no means acquit." He visits iniquity upon generations; 
He keeps mercy for ever. The sin is regarded from the unseen 
places as a temporary thing; because, somehow, imbedded in 
the nature of manhood, there is a healing element, a beneficent 
waiting and growing power, which sometime will make the 
sin as if it were not. We see some suggestion of this in the 
way Nature covers up crumbling ruins with her green vegeta- 
tion, and makes fertile grain fields out of the places where, in 
battle, multitudes of men killed each other. But this is only 
a partial suggestion; for the ruins do not cease to be ruins, nor 
do the butchered dead come to life, unless it be to a lower 
form of life. For the true significance of it we must go to a 
higher level of being; to the plane where the evolved creature 
comes in sight of his living Source. And there we find this 
truth: that in all this matter of sin man is persistently and 
consistently treated as if he were not yet fully evolved, as if 
he were still a child, with a child's unbridled impulses and un- 
ripe judgment, as if he were in a cavern, stumbling along in 
dimness of light, as if he were a minor, not yet ready for his 
heritage of free personality. It is no great feeder to our pride, 
but it is a mercy, that under this legal dispensation we are put 



92 THE LIFE INDEED 

in the class with imbeciles and lunatics and social wrecks; it 
is a gracious way of holding us less accountable, and of sus- 
pending judgment. So the onward way is still left open: it 
is not contemplated that the ruins should continue ruins, or 
that the dead should be beyond resurrection. Yet all this does 
not acquit the transgressor, or blink the sinfulness of sin. It 
is a way of concluding all under sin, that the gracious power 
of the world might have mercy upon all. And this it does by 
the sublimely simple way of treating men not merely as wrecks 
and ruins, needing a painful process of repair and patching up 
in kind, but as children, as immature, going through a period 
of growth and schooling and evolution, and saved for better 
things by the hope that still throbs through the tissues of his 
immaturity. In other words, this mercy inlaid in creation is 
essentially a prophecy of things to come, and a waiting for it. 
Consider at what a deadlock the soul of man would be if it 
were not for this protecting aegis of mercy, this perennial 
prophecy of a fuller and more adult manhood, to supplement 
what the law can give. Think first of the scientific conscious- 
ness it would engender; we can see this by looking at the con- 
sciousness actually engendered in the sad middle years of the 
nineteenth century, when agnosticism and materialism spread 
like a pall over everything. You recall that sombre interview 
with George Eliot, the priestess of the new science, which the 
late Frederic Myers has left on record. "I remember," he 
says, ''how I walked with her once in the Fellows' Garden of 
Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred some- 
what beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words 
which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls 
of men, — the words God, Immortality, Duty, — pronounced, 
with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how 
unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute 
the third. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the 
sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing law. I listened, 
and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned toward 
me like a Sibyl's in the gloom ; it was as though she withdrew 
from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and 



NEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 93 

left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates. And 
when we stood at length and parted, amid that columnar 
circuit of the forest-trees, beneath the last twilight of starless 
skies, I seemed to be gazing, like Titus at Jerusalem, on va- 
cant seats and empty halls, — on a sanctuary with no Presence 
to hallow it, and heaven left lonely of a God." Infinitely sad 
this, sadder even than Koheleth or Omar; when man gets into 
his inner spirit and life the sense of his prison and treadmill 
existence. Can we stop his progress at this deadlock; and if 
not, what more is needed, what food for prophecy and hope? 
Clearly, we must not stop here. 

Or take it again when man rises up against his doom, and 
rebelling against that which is, tries to bring about that which 
he deems ought to be. It is the impulse, you know, of that 
surging spirit in man to sit in judgment on the order of things 
with which he is surrounded and call for a better plan; as 
Omar Khayyam puts it: 

Ah Love ! could you and I with Him conspire 
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, 

Would not we shatter it to bits — and then 
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire ! 

Well, about this too there is the same note of unfinality, nay 
of sheer childishness and callow wrong-headedness, as if men 
had to make all their reforms by rule of thumb, and not only 
run the risk but inevitably incur the discount of evil on one 
side or the other, excesses and vagaries, false starts and an 
impulse generally unbalanced. You remember how it was with 
the French Revolution, before men got their noble plea of 
liberty, equality, and fraternity naturalized in the heart of 
society; why, they are working at it yet. The Russian nation 
seems to be bungling its job of revolution in much the same 
way; full of untempered hopes and blind desires, like so many 
children. It was only the other day that Count Witte said 
this of them: ''The only people who acted in their own in- 
terests were the revolutionists. They knew what they wanted. 
They chose the most effective means to attain it, and they are 
capable of adopting these means even at the price of heavy 



94 THE LIFE INDEED 

sacrifices. The revolutionists hide all their quarrels and ani- 
mosities and act together for the end they have in view, which 
spells destruction. Out of the resultant chaos they promise 
a new world and an earthly paradise." Is not all this like the 
untempered judgment of an untrained child, or an unripe 
youth, not yet fit to enter on his heritage of freedom? And 
if we would prophesy, have we the basis for believing that some 
time the spirit of man shall work in the sanity of perfect bal- 
ance and adultness, master of himself and his destiny? It is 
a grave question, is it not, at this age of the world? 

Or take once more that highest product of the reaction of 
the manhood spirit on his world of law: the man who will not 
be a slave but an athlete, accepting his conditions in all their 
burdensomeness, and standing up courageous and cheerful, 
saying ''I can." We honor such character; it is what we would 
all be. But here again we note the unfinality, the need of a 
supplementing and compensating prophecy. ''The moralist," 
says Professor James, ''must hold his breath and keep his 
muscles tense; and so long as this athletic attitude is possible 
all goes well — morality suffices. But the athletic attitude 
tends ever to break down, and it inevitably does break down 
even in the most stalwart, when the organism begins to decay, 
or when morbid fears invade the mind. To suggest personal 
will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of ir- 
remediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of 
things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very power- 
lessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and 
secures him, all decaying and failing as he is. Well, we are 
all such helpless failures in the last resort. The sanest and 
best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates, 
and death finally runs the robustest of us down. And when- 
ever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity and provisionality 
of our voluntary career comes over us that all our morality 
appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and 
all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well- 
heing that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas, are not." 

It is precisely on this athletic plane that the Old Testament 



HEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 95 

meets us with its revelation of mercy, the mercy of treating 
man as incomplete, immature, waiting for larger things. Its 
generous field of allowance is broad enough to cover also, with 
the rest, the athletic break-down, on the ground that it is the 
break-down, the limitation, of youth and upward-mounting 
strength. You remember that sublime culmination of the 
fortieth of Isaiah, where the prophet is taxing language and 
imagery to describe a living God who ''fainteth not neither is 
weary," and who because He can wait will have His people 
wait and hope with Him: "Even the youths," he says, ''shall 
faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: but 
they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they 
shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not 
be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint." 

We are getting in sight now of what prophecy is for, what in 
the large essential sense it means. Prophecy is the soul of the 
Old Testament, making it, as no other book in the world is, 
the book of the future. I am reverting here to the older and 
simpler idea of prophecy, the idea that comes unforced into 
the mind of any unlettered man. Bible students and critics 
are at great pains nowadays, you know, to get an idea of 
prophecy which will leave room for a possible falsification of 
specific prediction: they say that it does not mean foretelling 
but fortelling, as of an advocate speaking for God, or forth- 
telling, as of a herald announcing and emphasizing a message. 
All this is true enough, except the negative; prophecy does in- 
clude these things. But primarily I take it to mean straight 
foretelling; it is concerned, in the large, with predicting what 
the spirit of man shall come to when he has survived his grop- 
ing callow youthful period and enters upon his full heritage 
of life; it is the glowing vision of the poet, who 

sings of what the world will be 
When the years have died away; 

but it strikes hands also with the view of the evolutionist, who 
must needs see his great river of created life going on ever to 
more life and fuller. This, I say, is the very soul of the Old 



96 THE LIFE INDEED 

Testament; its soul, just as the rigid empire of law is its body. 
Justice, righteousness, obligation to rule, are in the nature of 
things as its bony structure, its brawn and sinew, its hands 
and brain; but mercy and grace, the wise allowance that waits 
for childhood to be traversed and strength to come, is the inner 
reserve of spirit informing and vitalizing that same nature of 
things. Without this, creation would be but half made, and 
would not be evolution at all. The law of being would be 
there, but it would harden into machinery and routine, always 
grinding out, from generation to generation, the same dull grist. 
You see how it developed in the Hebrew nation, when after 
Malachi it suffered an eclipse of prophecy and entered upon 
its night of legalism. Its Mosaic regime developed an elaborate 
ceremonialism and ecclesiasticism, and after a little its priest- 
hood fell into the hands of Sadducees, who were political aris- 
tocrats and skeptics, and not spiritually-minded at all; and so 
the order of things settled down to live life by frame-work and 
rule. You can think what would follow such a state of things. 
A certain public lecturer of whom I once heard, who had to 
repeat his carefully prepared lecture several times a week 
during a whole season, remarked that he got so used to his 
task that he could just set his face going and go off and leave 
it. Something like this is the besetting danger of ceremonial- 
ism and ritual. Dealing with something changeless, estab- 
lished, eternally divine, it tends to put this into the automatic 
part of our being, and having set it going, to go off (spiritu- 
ally) and leave it. This is no argument, of course, against 
form and ceremony, but rather against the indifference to its 
vital core and essence. And the corrective to this tendency 
in the Hebrew nation was prophecy; the essence of which, 
speaking of Carlyle, Principal Shairp thus describes: ''In this 
he was akin to all the prophets, one of their brotherhood, — 
that he maintained the spiritual and d5mamic forces in man 
as against the mechanical.'^ Thus it was that through a long 
period prophecy wrought among the Hebrews as the comple- 
ment and corrective of their ceremonial Mosaism, to keep life 
and religion genuine. It was the soul of their Dispensation; 



HEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 97 

inspiring them onward to a nobler future^ and keeping vital 
the claims of growth and spiritual progress. 

A question much debated nowadays is, why, instead of send- 
ing missionaries and interfering with the religious affairs of 
other nations and races, we should not be content to let them 
remain as they are: giving the Chinaman his Confucius, and 
the Buddhist his legend of Gautama, and the Persian his ven- 
erable Zoroastrianism, and the Mohammedan his Koran, and 
bidding them work out their own salvation in their own ethni- 
cal and temperamental way. Do not all these books inculcate 
lofty morality, and lay down strict rules of worship; are not 
all of them books of life, as their devotees have come to see 
life, and are they not adapted to race and climate and sphere 
of ideas? Well, I waive here the practical test which we 
might well make, ''By their fruits ye shall know them;'' I 
need not open the question which so naturally answers itself, 
what kind of men, what kind of ideals, what kind of society, 
what stripe of civilization, these so-called sacred books make. 
It is a deeper test that meets us here. The thing that differ- 
entiates our Bible from all these others — and in this I in- 
clude the Old Testament no whit less than the New — is the 
fact that it is preeminently, uniquely, the Book of the Future. 
Some superintending Power and Wisdom has drawn its lines 
so accurately and truly that it follows the onward-flowing 
current of manhood evolution; it deepens and broadens 
'steadily forward toward more life and fuller, toward the time 
and summit where the spirit of man shall be master of his 
life and his fate, toward the Life Indeed. In this sense it is, 
precisely in this sense of victorious evolution, that the Bible, 
from beginning to end, is of prophecy all compact. By the 
side of it we place these other books, and they seem to have 
been arrested in their course, to be off somewhere in the eddies 
of being, puddling and regurgitating; not in the majestic on- 
ward-sweeping main current. Look into them, and you will 
see them taken up with ceremonies, and repetitions of vain 
words, and dull lists of rules, with here and there, as it were 
fortuitously, a glimpse of something beautiful and sublime 



98 THE LIFE INDEED 

But there is a sad lack of central principle and motive; their 
righteousness is not adequately rooted in life and character; 
and they radiate not light and inner truth but heat and 
fanaticism and bigotry. They are not in the current of the 
future, the river of evolving life, but only in the eddies and 
standing ponds, where they gather foam and dirt and slimy 
scum. 

Yet these books have more to say about the Hereafter, 
about immortality and the mode of it, or it may be the nega- 
tion of it, than has our Bible. They have created the picture 
of an existence beyond according to their own image: prom- 
ising to the Mohammedan a sensual and sensuous paradise, 
to the Egyptian a rigid Rhadamanthine justice, to the Hindoo, 
with his contempt of the body, a dreamy Nirvana, which is 
just the negation of all energy, an apotheosis of mental and 
moral inaction. And all this while the old Hebrew Bible has 
gone on, developing and systematizing its code of law, accept- 
ing its rigid conditions, toning up life always by singing of 
mercy and judgment, rejoicing in a protecting God, and calling 
for the divine verdict on its own well-doing; yet never formu- 
lating its idea of immortality, or getting it into definite enough 
shape to make it a motive of conduct. The whole old Dis- 
pensation answers fitly to that idea of Koheleth's: of a crea- 
tion with the vitalizing power of eternity in its heart, yet not 
yet with the clear sight of the beginning or the end of things. 
It is consciously in an onward-moving current of being; and 
instead of concerning itself with the ocean to which it tends, 
it is mainly concerned with keeping the law-imbued current of 
life strong and just and pure. 

Here, surely, is a remarkable thing to note. What is 
prophecy for, we naturally ask, but to find out the future? 
What has man's impulse always been, but to peer into the 
beyond, to find something there by which to govern and di- 
rect his behavior here? Think of the clumsy, floundering, 
blind-eyed means that men have taken to ascertain the will 
of the gods: magic, necromancy, astrology, the entrails of 
beasts, the flight of birds; think of the wizards and mediums 



HEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME 99 

and augurs and Delphic priestesses that have been interro- 
gated, in the desperate endeavor to get some light on the fu- 
ture, some direction great or small, for the guidance of life. 
A sad revelation, is it not, of a universal atmosphere, in all 
the ancient nations, of dimness and doubt. But in all this 
you will note one invariable thing: the future direction that 
they seek is the direction of the man that now is, seeking his 
own sordid and earthly ends; and the life sought beyond is 
a projection and extension of this same plane of being on which 
they are now content to live, and would live indefinitely if the 
fate of untimely death were not so sure to overtake them. It 
is through fear of death that they are all their lifetime sub- 
ject to bondage. The trouble is, they haven't the use of what 
we have called our biometer; have not the true and growing 
light on life itself. The life that is, is just as much in the dark 
as the life that is to be: and they have lost both the thirst for 
it and the standard of measurement. The Hebrews too, you 
will say, had their priestly oracle, their Urim and Thummim; 
a German professor. Professor Siegfried, has even carried his 
lack of the larger sense so far as to reduce their law itself, 
their Torah, primarily to decision by oracle, as if their guid- 
ance of life footed back to much the same sort of inquiry that 
the heathen made when they noted the entrails of beasts. But 
from one thing, you will note, the Hebrew ideal was providen- 
tially saved; and it is a wonder too, when we compare with 
them all the nations round them. They would have nothing 
to do with necromancy and familiar spirits and wizards that 
peep and mutter. From the swamps of the occult and 
mediumship they were mercifully preserved. It would seem 
as if their conscious walk in the presence and guidance of 
Jehovah made it impossible so to reduce the dignity of life: 
their ordinary living, shot through and through as it was with 
religious service, created for them a plane of larger being from 
which they could look down on these dusky black arts with 
disgust and disdain. Yet all this time the eternity in their 
heart was a living prophecy; it kept the power of the future 
vital. And the future to which they were bound was ulti- 



loo THE LIFE INDEED 

mately a future life, with all the coordinations and furnishings 
of life in full working order. They were by no means indif- 
ferent to the beyond, though their Book says so little about 
it. You remember how the author of the Epistle to the He- 
brews characterizes those Old Testament worthies and their 
manly yet always unsatisfied fight for life. ''They that say 
such things declare plainly that, they seek a country, a home. 
And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from 
whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to 
have returned. But now they desire a better country, that is, 
an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their 
God; for he hath prepared for them a city.'' That was the 
deep and central tone of the Old Testament heart, as it was 
struggling and aspiring forward toward the fulness of the time. 
The whole power of immortality was there, vitally at work, in 
a deathless energy of endeavor and faith. 

But still working in dimness and twilight. Why was this, 
we ask; why was not the Holy City revealed at once? The 
answer to this question brings us face to face with the soul 
of prophecy. Something else must be revealed, an indispen- 
sable condition and basis, before the city came in sight, before 
the spirit of man could find or even see its true home. And 
so you will have noted that the body of Old Testament proph- 
ecy centres not in a coming bliss or a coming existence be- 
yond death, but in a coming Man. It is Messianic; it is 
looking first for a King of life, an embodiment of full man- 
hood, a Personality from which shall ray forth all the truth of 
life, in guidance and mercy and judgment. "Behold," says 
Isaiah, ''a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall 
rule in judgment. And a man shall be as an hiding-place from 
the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water 
in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." 
Nor is this refuge and comfort all that is prophesied. The 
great thing about it is that when the king comes men shall 
see things as they are; shall see through good and evil, and 
false and true; shall give things their right names, and know 
when a man is good and when he is wicked, when large and 



HEARING THE FULNESS OF THE TIME loi 

generous and when only small and churlish. In other words, 
with the coming of the Man will come also the true light of 
life. "And the eyes of them that see shall not be dim, and 
the ears of them that hear shall hearken; the heart of the 
rash also shall understand knowledge, and the tongue of the 
stammerers shall be ready to speak plainly. The vile person 
shall no more be called liberal, nor the churl said to be bounti- 
ful. For the vile person will speak villainy, and his heart will 
work iniquity, to practise hypocrisy, and to utter error against 
the Lord, to make empty the soul of the hungry, and he will 
cause the drink of the thirsty to fail. The instruments also 
of the churl are evil: he deviseth wicked devices to destroy 
the poor with lying words, even when the needy speaketh right. 
But the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things 
shall he stand." Is not this the real light that is needed, the 
real illumination of prophecy? What would a city be without 
it; how could men set up a livable existence beyond the grave 
without being first able to see things as they are, and enter 
upon the fulness of life as it is? Now you see how divinely 
wise a thing it was, that the Old Testament did not begin its 
prophecy with immortality. Before we can have an immor- 
tality worthy of the name we must first have a manhood 
worthy of the thing, a manhood wise and true and merciful 
and strong. And this Messianic object is the soul of prophecy. 
I cannot stay now to trace, much as the subject invites it, 
how this idea of a coming Man was gradually freed from 
littleness and limitation; how it was enlarged and enriched 
and made glorious, how it became an idea in which not the 
Jews only but all nations should rejoice and be saved, flocking 
to Jerusalem like doves to their windows, and eager to bow 
to the sway of the coming King. The prophecy, like all 
prophecies, is sometimes foreshortened; and men's present 
ideals cling to it; the King's universal reign over mankind is 
not without the thought of conquest, in which he will shatter 
the wicked in pieces like a potter's vessel. We know now how 
such prophecy was destined to come out; and how the wicked 
were to be shattered by ceasing to be wicked, and how nations 



I02 THE LIFE INDEED 

were to bow because it was seen as their own blessedness and 
emancipation so to do. All this we can leave the fulness of 
the time to work out: we have meanwhile the figure of the 
coming Man, in whom manhood should have free and full 
course, and be fitted at last for the goal, the Holy City and 
the commonwealth beyond. 

But the idea led on to the depths of being too; and it is 
no wonder if here the glowing heart of the prophet should 
pause and study. The coming Man, the Servant of Jehovah, 
must also suffer; his way could not be all bliss and self-indul- 
gence. Here is a marvelous revelation of the spirit of man 
dreaming on things to come. You remember how St. Peter 
looked back on that prophetic time of the Old Dispensation, 
and saw the prophets at work and their body of prophecy as 
it were in the making. It is on the sufferings of their coming 
Man that he sees them studying, that hardest thing to receive; 
yet the spirit of Christ which was in them seemed to demand 
it, and they had no thought of denial but only of how to fit 
sacrifice and humiliation into the times and of the order of 
things. "Of which salvation," he says, "the prophets have 
inquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace 
that should come unto you: searching what, or what manner 
of time the spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, 
when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the 
glory that should follow." 

So it was: the soul of prophecy is confronting a great abyss 
and ocean of manhood life; and it studies it eagerly and de- 
voutly, as it finds itself borne onward toward the fulness of 
the time. The spirit of man, in that twilight period, has not 
merely risen up against its doom, nor has it set itself idly to 
forecast its future; it is concerned to bring into order and har- 
mony all the deeps of being that the growing light has revealed, 
all of which manhood is capable, its joys, its honors, its suf- 
ferings alike, as elements in the way to its ultimate glory. 



IV 

THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

WHAT VITAL ELEMENTS INHERE IN THE ADULT LIFE 
THAT MANHOOD IS APPROACHING 

I. The Second Birth 
II. The Outward Current 
III. The Evidence of Things not Seen 



IV 

THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

IT MAKES all the difference in the world^ in our estimate 
of the Life Indeed, whether we are at a point where we 
can look back and down upon it, as from a more elevated 
and sunlit region, or are still plodding forward and upward 
toward it, as it were through dim defiles and over tortuous 
and flinty trails, where we come only here and there upon 
fleeting glimpses of the outlook, as it were by lights broken 
and withdrawn. Or to put it in the figure we have been using, 
it makes all the difference whether we see life by daylight or 
in the uncertain gloaming. The world's realization of life must 
needs come in this way: first the twilight, then the dawn; first 
the natural, as St. Paul says, after that the spiritual. We have 
seen the struggling spirit of man reacting dimly on his world 
of environment, consciously incomplete and faulty, shaping 
ideals of mercy and judgment in view of what was yet to be, 
ideals which gradually rounded into a prophecy of a coming 
manhood, in whose fulness of life men could see things as they 
are. We are ready to take up the consideration of this now, 
as our next historical step forward; but first let us take a 
breathing-spell to look round us a little and see where we have 
been and what the daybreak reveals. You remember how 
simply Bunyan describes this outlook and breathing-spell, in 
the journey of his Pilgrim; it came after the Pilgrim had been 
alone all night in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and just 
as he began to be cheered by the voice of one going on before. 

So he went on and called to him that was before; but he knew not what 
to answer, for that he also thought himself to be alone. And by and by the 
day broke. Then said Christian: "He hath turned the shadow of death into 
the morning." 

Now morning being come, he looked back, not out of desire to return, 



io6 THE LIFE INDEED 

but to see, by the light of the day, what hazards he had gone through in the 
dark. So he saw more perfectly the ditch that was on the one hand, and 
the quag that was on the other; also how narrow the way was which led 
betwixt them both; also now he saw the hobgoblins and satyrs and dragons 
of the pit, but all afar off, for after break of day they came not nigh. 
Yet they were discovered to him according to that which is written, "He 
discovereth deep things out of darkness, and bringeth out to light the 
shadow of death." 

Now was Christian much affected with his deliverance from all the dangers 
of his solitary way, which dangers, though he feared them more before, yet 
he saw them more clearly now, because the light of the day made them 
conspicuous to him. And about this time the sun was rising, and this was 
another mercy to Christian; for you must note that though the first part 
of the Valley of the Shadow of Death was dangerous, yet this second part, 
which he was yet to go, was, if possible, far more dangerous; for from the 
place where he now stood, even to the end of the valley, the way was all 
along set so full of snares, traps, gins, and nets here, and so full of pits, 
pitfalls, deep holes, and shelvings down there, that, had it now been dark, 
as it was when he came the first part of the way, had he had a thousand 
souls, they had in reason been cast away. But, as I said, just now the sun 
was rising. Then said he: "His candle shineth on my head, and by his light 
I go through darkness." 

To name the thing that we are to consider in this breathing- 
spell of ours, I have chosen a phrase of St. Paul's, "The law of 
the spirit of life"; we want to know, now that we approach the 
adult life so long prophesied, what vital elements inhere in it. 
These have been there working in the dimness, all the while, 
struggling toward the dawn, putting forth blind and doubtful 
energies; like Milton's lion in the creation, pawing to get free 
their hinder parts. As with Bunyan's Pilgrim, the way 
hitherto has been shadowed by death; but we are coming in 
sight of a Man, say rather of a manhood, whose mission and 
function it is to ''deliver them who through fear of death were 
all their lifetime subject to bondage." In other words, we 
stand now on the threshold of the solution stage of life, in 
which, as prophesied, we can see and discount things as they 
are; and the first thing we find here is, that as the growing 
spirit of man "dares more and more to love and trust instead 
of to fear and fight," the uncouth objects of fear, like Bunyan's 
hobgoblins, slink away into their native gloom, themselves 
afraid of daylight. "The law of the spirit of life," as St. Paul 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 107 

says, ^'. . . hath made me free from the law of sin and 
death." 

I think that when the apostle penned that pregnant phrase 
he was well aware of the latent contradiction of terms that was 
in it, and that he took this way of asserting its final reconcile- 
ment. The spirit of life, being spirit, connotes perfect free- 
dom of will, freedom from what has bound and impeded, free- 
dom to do as we please. Nay, he says it is the thing that makes 
free from the old law that has fettered and terrified us. The 
vision of freedom, liberty, is what nerves and inspires pro- 
gressive peoples and revolutionists; yet in its cosmic sense 
freedom is one of the three things, the others being God and im- 
mortality, which to men like Professor Haeckel are absolutely 
inconceivable. I need not remind you further of the libraries 
that have been written on the question whether the spirit of 
man is free, or whether in reality he is only a kind of automa- 
ton, worked by fated laws of bent and heredity, and having a 
false sense of freedom. With the involvements of this problem, 
its physics and metaphysics, men have become so tangled and 
baffled, that it has come to be taken for granted as one of the 
insoluble things. Perhaps it is temerity to touch upon it here; 
but St. Paul's bold phrase helps us see, I think, where to place 
it. The whole problem belongs to the impedimenta of the 
lower and twilight stratum, to that level of life whereon, as a 
slave and prisoner, man obeys one law with the beasts and 
lies down in the same grave. We have seen how little this 
animal or even intellectual stratum yielded for immortality; 
it yields just as little for real freedom. It is no wonder Pro- 
fessor Haeckel denies freedom to the human; his scheme of 
life cannot see above the eyes and the finer brute. But let 
the soul of man once reach the higher level, where the instinct 
of his being is the spirit of life, and the bafflement disappears, 
the problem is no longer a problem. Freedom, the manhood 
will emancipated from bondage and fetters, becomes the ac- 
tual, luminous, boundless fact. Yet just at this point 
and emphasizing it, St. Paul's paradox and contradiction 
of terms comes in. That spirit of Hfe, ideally free as it is, is 



io8 THE LIFE INDEED 

still the law of the spirit of life; Scripture applies to it also 
another paradoxical phrase, the law of liberty. It is not ca- 
price, not licence, not anarchy; being still law it is inflexibly 
loyal to order and the fruitful calculable ongoings of the uni- 
verse; still a higher law even when it boldly ventures on what 
has been called the higher lawlessness. What was before sub- 
servient to routine and the behest of an alien will, is 
now wedded to the chosen wisdom of life. So we have not 
risen out of the cosmic empire of law; rather the law of our 
being is honored and fulfilled now as it never was before, and 
the weights and sins which so easily beset us are laid aside 
for wings and the eager strength to run a race and win. 

This is hard to understand perhaps, just as the reconcile- 
ment of any two mutually exclusive ideas into a larger inclu- 
sive one always is, until we have examined its steps and 
elements; wherefore I must beg your patience through the 
chapter. Meanwhile an illustration or two drawn from other 
spheres of life may serve to show how real is the principle 
we are establishing. I was listening a few weeks ago to a 
lecture on Greek art, in which the lecturer showed by word 
and picture how up to a certain point of development the 
artist, not yet master of his secret, was bound by conventions 
and prescriptions and shop rules, the exacting laws of his 
trade; and how accordingly every line, though faultlessly 
correct, was stiff, angular, as it were concealed in dead 
formalism. Then all at once there seemed to come a time 
when the artist, impelled by a more masterful initiative, began 
to make free with his rules, and dared in a higher interest and 
vision to disobey them; and lo, the marble began to palpitate 
with naturalness and strength and the suggestion of breathing 
life. It was the bondage to time-worn law and convention 
passing into freedom. In every great art it is so. In our art 
of life, too, I find a curious adumbration of this, in Koheleth's 
strange counsel to man not to be too righteous and thereby 
undo himself, and not to be too wicked either and so die be- 
fore his time, but to let a sincere reverence be his guide. "It 
is good," he says, "that thou lay hold of this, and from that, 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 109 

too, refrain not thy hand, for he that feareth God shall come 
forth of them all." Do we not perceive here the free spirit of 
life making its presence felt? Koheleth would have his man 
an artist in life, a master workman, no more a slave to dead 
rules of righteousness than to disintegrating licence of wicked- 
ness; he must be above his rules, not beneath them; so that 
in his masterfulness like Beethoven he could break the laws 
of the pedants and gain his sublimer effect, or like Cromwell 
could cast the accepted laws of war to the winds and win his 
victories. ''It is magnificent, but it is not war," was once said 
of such untrammeled boldness. And there must come a time, 
it would seem, when the growing spirit of man, if he would 
reach the height of masterful personality, in the image of God, 
must boldly enter on a stage of being where he is larger than 
his rules, his codes of law, his conventions, his prescriptions; 
where the free spirit that is in him shall be his wise and suffi- 
cient guide. There is something of the artist ideal here, the 
ideal of the master workman. It is a phase, or rather it is 
the core and centre, of the conflict and alliance of law and 
liberty. This is what we mean by the law of the spirit of life. 
But how to get the transition made; what elements of the 
spirit of man to lay hold of and appropriate, — this is the 
great question that rises here, like a mystic barrier to sur- 
mount. Too evidently man is facing not only an epoch but 
a grave crisis in his evolution. His spirit has all along reacted 
bravely against his limitations and his doom ; but on the whole 
dimly and uncertainly, for the onsets of the animal and the 
worldly have beset him behind and before. Use his being's 
law as he will, yet he is just as truly used by it, often to alien 
and evil purpose, and always in the shadow of untimely death. 
The slave bends supinely under; and even the athlete, re- 
joicing in his strength, breaks down eventually. To pass from 
the sphere of well-doing to the sphere of well-being, from the 
under side of his environment to the upper, where even weak- 
ness may have its prevailing fibre of strength; this is the prob- 
lem that confronts us here, and it is the crucial problem of 
the Life Indeed. There is a mystic door to open, a veil to 



no THE LIFE INDEED 

rend, a Jordan to cross. Evolution, no less than revelation, 
demands it; and if the solution does not lie on the other side, 
then there is no solution of the life-problem at all. Take it 
how we will, we must, in order to go on, make incursion here 
into the unseen; for it is there that the spirit of life prevails 
and prospers. 

It is here that evolutionary science has shrunk back baffled ; 
for here it is that we must lay aside microscope and test-tube 
and betake ourselves to wholly new apparatus and method of 
approach. But it does not beseem us to despair, even as scien- 
tific explorers, as if here evolution must stop. 

What, my soul? see thus far and no farther? when doors great and small, 
Nine-and-ninety fiew ope at our touch, should the hundredth appall? 
In the least things have faith, yet distrust in the greatest of all? 

If, as we have been assured, ^'the spirit of man is the candle 
of the Lord, searching all the inward parts of the body," let 
us not discard our sublimely simple apparatus, here where it 
is most needed. Especially so as our alleged resource is so 
ample. Here is our chance to consult the scientific text-book 
of the ages and eternities; to see whether, as asserted, the 
Word of God proves itself such by being "quick and powerful, 
and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the 
dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and mar- 
row, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the 
heart." If we have not our instrument of research here, we 
have none at all. Let us give it a fair test and employment. 

According to its concrete folk-idiom, which has been fol- 
lowed out in elaborate schemes of theology and soteriology, 
the way, until a few decades ago, has seemed very clear. It 
has crystallized in what has been called the plan of salvation. 
But somehow since, as I believe, an all-wise Providence has 
framed the mind of our age to a scientific temper and exaction, 
a haze has seemed to gather round this venerable scheme of 
things. The solution it provides seems to be exclusively an 
affair of miracle and supernatural extrication; a deus ex ma- 
china, an unmotived irruption from without, through the arbi- 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE in 

trary agency of the coming of Christ, with its complex train of 
redemption and atonement and justification and sanctification. 
All this looks like an opus operatum, effected by one trans- 
cendent Being, whether more God or man we can hardly judge, 
and offered to us to take or leave, but in any case as our only 
resource. Nay, we have been so assured that He did all the 
work, and that nothing either great or small remained for us 
to do, that many have profanely said: ''Let Him work; it is 
only a Hebrew and Jewish scheme after all, and we have no 
call to bother ourselves about it. If He has done it all, why, 
we may as well take His interpreters at their word, and do 
nothing." Now far be it from me to reject or caricature this 
so-called plan of salvation ; my concern is not to prove it false, 
but to find in what sense it is true. Still, there is this un- 
deniable inertia and indifference to this scheme to be reckoned 
with; we need, if it is true and has still the potency of appeal 
to men, to translate it into modern and scientific terms. And 
this we can best do by heeding the wholesome demand of the 
age. Our instinctive desire, and it is no profane one or skep- 
tical, calls for a solution not by an irruption from without but 
by an evolution of forces stored within. We want to see the 
way to the summit of manhood continuous and growing, with 
causes and potencies all in their ordained place and doing their 
work as it were by laws of nature. In other words, it is the 
law of the spirit of life, in its evolutionary order, that we want, 
not an arbitrary miracle. To this, in our present temper, we 
can commit ourselves; and if, as it comes about, it reveals a 
continuous road from that remote time when the spirit of God 
brooded on the face of the waters, or if at the far culmination 
of personality it evidences itself as interacting with the divine, 
why, so much the better. Men have no objection to being sons 
of God, in character and spirit as they already are in skill and 
inventiveness and reason; they only wish, in the way that our 
age's temper has made imperative, to trace the real derivation 
and family likeness. 

This is why I have been searching the elements of the Life 
Indeed at such length and detail through the obscure twilight 



112 THE LIFE INDEED 

period. It was all-important that when the fulness of the time 
was revealed, we should be duly aware of what it was that 
gradually and growingly filled the time. It was the endeavor 
to see how truly the evolution of manhood is orderly and rea- 
sonable, and how when the freedom came it should still include, 
in unimpaired operation, all the wealth and worth of its ante- 
cedent law. 

But, now that we have traversed that stratum and stand 
looking over into the dispensation of the fulness of the times, 
we are more aware than ever, in spite of the continuous prog- 
ress of spirituality that we have noted, that we are facing a 
vital crisis in the uprise of manhood. There is, as I have said, 
a mysterious door yet to open, the hundredth and last after 
the ninety-and-nine, a door into the upper spiritual room. 
There is a note of the mystic and transcendental about it, not 
to say of the supernatural. The emergence from blind fate to 
illuminate destiny, from prison to freedom, from the natural 
to the spiritual, is as it were the birth of a new man, the Super- 
man, as our latest time is beginning dimly to call it. Strange, 
is it not, by the way, that quite apart from Bible revelation, 
men should have come to make such confession that the old' 
moral and social order has exhausted its potencies, and to call 
on the unseen to help them out? The old world of social con- 
ventions and manners, of organized good customs, is growing 
decrepit; and men, created upright, have sought out so many 
inventions, through which even organized morals may become 
honeycombed with selfish evils, that we must needs have a 
Superman, whose habitat is a radically transformed world. 
The scenery, the cherished ideals and impulses, nay the very 
direction and current of things, must be as it were metamor- 
phosed. Call this miracle or evolution, call it divine or human, 
men of sober evolutionary mind are coming to see that there 
is this amazing transition to be effected, if manhood would 
reach the height of its craving and promise. 

It is just at this point that our scripture text-book puts the 
supreme vital crisis; here that it puts the one grand uprise, 
as momentous, as mysterious, as far-reaching as we have 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 113 

deemed the transition to be from earth to heaven; nay, in the 
light and power of it this latter fades into insignificance, and 
death itself is said to be abolished. Right at this point it is 
that the solution comes in sight; and I solicit your patience if 
I take pains and space to define it. I do not think that either 
science or theology has taken anything like adequate account 
of this tremendous Biblical view of things. We could not ex- 
pect science to have done so, perhaps; for its field of biological 
vision is so filled with the life of the body that necessarily its 
supreme crisis is physical death; or, if it has gone into the 
higher evolution, it has used up its insight on the phenomena 
of human consciousness, and does not project its cares beyond. 
Consciousness — that is only the bare background; the frame- 
work in which all that is moral, spiritual, and therefore truly 
vital, is enclosed. Theology, too, has been so mixed up with 
law and grace, faith and works, morals and redemption, and 
has made life depend on such diverse not to say discordant 
things, that we hardly know whether it is more concerned to 
get a man good enough, that is, church-going and law-abiding 
enough, to squeak into heaven through his works, or to make 
him cling frantically to the skirts of a historic Personage, and 
thereby get a pull, so to say, with the final Dispenser of des- 
tiny. In any case the moment of physical death bulks so large 
in the scheme, that it is virtually taken as the point where 
everything is irrevocably fixed and determined. They have 
no real conception of resurrection, except a speculative and 
spectacular resurrection somewhere beyond. Now do not put 
me in the ranks of the scoffers for describing the situation so. 
Science and theology are both right enough, perhaps, according 
to their light. But you see they have neither of them disen- 
tangled the spiritual from the natural enough to see what the 
real trend of things is. And indeed, we must not blame them. 
They have all the complexities of earth to reckon with. 
The spirit of man is still in a material body, as it were in its 
embryonic stage, drawing placental nourishment from a world 
of sense and morals and law; every spirit must get its pre- 
natal education; and not a jot nor tittle can pass until all is 



114 ^^^ l^iFE INDEED 

fulfilled. It will not make matters less clear, however, but 
more so, if we escape for a while from these thickets of the- 
ology and science to the broad open where the spirit of man, 
having surmounted the twilight and bondage stratum, enters 
royally on its birthright of freedom and adultness. Here is 
the birth of the new man; here it is that life and immortality 
emerge to light; here then is the real vital crisis and spirit. 

It is with the incarnation of this spirit of life in a Supreme 
Man, in a perfect Manhood, that prophecy, as we have seen, 
is centrally concerned; not with the unseen future, or with 
mystic states of being, but first of all with a manhood worthy 
to possess and glorify the future. The soul's home, as the 
prophets deeply saw, lay in this. That was the wise order of 
things. Get this object effected, and the rest follows by 
natural consequence. We saw, though too meagrely detailed, 
how this healthy previsional instinct, which in Shakespeare's 
phrase we may call 

the prophetic soul 
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come, 

approached its object not by drawing imaginative pictures of 
His person and kingly trappings, nor by casting horoscopes of 
His exact times. We belittle Messianic prophecy unspeakably 
by making it focus in such casual things as these. Rather, 
the prophets were interrogating the spirit of life that was in 
them, the spirit of grace and mercy and sacrifice, and rounding 
its majestic demands into one personality; and when they gave 
this personality a title, Messiah, the Anointed One, it was 
really the name of that fulness and masterfulness toward which 
all the avenues of their being conducted, that representative 
completeness of their manhood whom they could anoint as 
Pattern and Head, — Prophet to inspire. Priest to atone. King 
to receive loyalty and fealty. It was the spirit of life in them 
coming to concrete expression; or as St. Peter defined it when 
he looked in upon them at work, the spirit of Christ, the su- 
preme manhood, itself. Here is a significant thing. The spirit 
of life that was stirring there, so long before Jesus, was al- 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 115 

ready the spirit of Christ, and so of the highest, freest Hfe, 
reverently interrogating its ideals, and trying to fit these into 
the times, and not without amazed wonder at the solemn in- 
volvements of them. All this is of the preparation, the slow 
making of man, by the shaping touch of the spirit. 

Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning Age of ages, 

Shall not ason after aeon pass and touch him into shape? 

All about him shadow still, but, while the races flower and fade, 

Prophet-eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on the shade, 
Till the peoples all are one, and all their voices blend in choric 
Hallelujah to the Maker, "It is finish'd. Man is made." 

But we have not to postpone all vision to the far future. The 
spirit of life is already so aware of itself and its vital principle 
that we can reduce it to its higher law. 

This, in some degree, is the business of the coming sections. 
We may see then, I hope, how truly this is the law of a higher 
evolutionary stage, mysterious and inexplicable until we stand 
where we can see it from above. 

I. THE SECOND BIRTH 

The spiritual life, like all life, begins with birth. That is 
its law. It is not a thing put on, like a policy, and therefore 
with a policy's trend of supple opportunism; nor a thing la- 
boriously ciphered out, like a philosophy, and therefore de- 
pendent on depth of thought; not a thing submitted to like an 
allotment, as is law; nor on the other hand achieved by re- 
bellion, as is an uprise of anarchy. It is born in a man, taking 
into itself therefore all the native currents of his being, and as 
solid and calculable as is his personality itself. This is the 
mystery of it, that it may supervene some time along in life, 
when as it would seem the bent is already determined, and yet 
have a wholly new bent and direction of its own, which at once 
transforms and regulates the old, keeping every good thing 
intact. We have the description of this second birth from the 
Man who of all men was most competent to define it; from 
our Lord Himself, who, regarding the fulness of life that was 



ii6 THE LIFE INDEED 

in Him^ best knew how He came by it, and what it was like. 
In the name of all the spiritually born He said, ^We speak 
that we do know, and testify that we have seen;" and we can- 
not go back of His account, to verify or gainsay, until we are 
like Him, seeing with His eyes. ''He that is spiritual," as 
St. Paul says, "judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of 
no man." 

Our Lord's remarks on the second birth occur, you re- 
member, in his conversation with Nicodemus, one of the most 
cherished and quoted passages in the whole Bible. Nicode- 
mus, a man high in Jewish counsels, and so a typical repre- 
sentative of the time-honored consciousness of life, had come 
by night to Jesus because he, a teacher in Israel, intuitively 
recognized in the younger man a teacher sent from God. It 
was, though not without its tremors of caution, the drawing 
of a sincere and truth-seeking heart. You remember how 
inexplicable the first onset of the new idea was to him. ''How 
can these things be?" To the Jewish mind, moulded in its 
consciousness of all-encompassing law and prescription, 
nothing could have seemed more calculated to dissolve the 
whole order of things and launch the spirit of man on a shore- 
less ocean of unrestraint. Apparently to make the shock as 
great as possible, our Lord springs the new idea upon him 
without preface or preparation, as if, like the new birth itself. 
He would impose the very thought of it upon mankind as a 
kind of crisis and astonishment. Men must be startled, as it 
were, out of the old way into the new; as must needs be, per- 
haps, because of the sudden and complete reversal of the cur- 
rents of being. Yet it is all so orderly and viable too; no labor 
and logic about it; a moment, and the change is made. The 
spirit awakes, the will springs responsive, and lo, it is free. 
It is like that cripple at Bethesda who for thirty-eight years 
had been lying passive, waiting for some one to save him all 
volition and initiative and just souse him in the pool. ^^Wilt 
thou be made whole?" was the question that came ringing to 
his startled ears one day; but even then, not seeing the point 
of the inquiry, he began to whine because some one else al- 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 117 

ways got in ahead of him. ''Rise, take up thy bed, and walk," 
was the only answer to his complaint; and almost before he 
knew it he was stepping forth out of his hospital, a sound, 
whole man. Where did the onset of health begin, and was it 
natural or spiritual? Just so our strange fact comes to us. 
The second birth is the last term of a long embryonic process, 
and all the power and growth of the process is in it; but, like 
its fleshly analogue, it is the sudden opening of doors from a 
womb to a world. It was of such a described event as this that 
Nicodemus, still environed by the womb of the old dispensa- 
tion, still in the unbreathing dark, asked in utter bewilderment, 
"How can these things be?" 

Before we raise Nicodemus' question for ourselves, which 
we must needs do, and especially in its evolutionary light, let us 
look a little more closely at our Lord's presentation of the 
matter. His abrupt beginning relates to a subject which, when 
He spoke, was evidently in the air — the Kingdom of God. 
That phrase puts into words a great presentiment that just 
then was stirring obscurely in men's minds: the presentiment 
that somehow the fulness of the time was close upon them, 
and that a new order of things was ripe and ready. Pharisee 
and fisherman alike, minds set in the legal order and minds 
tending to the spiritual alike, now felt the strange electric 
thrill, and were inquiring what it might mean. It was not for 
nothing, nor for a small thing, like a mere change of dynasty 
or release from Roman rule, that the surging spirit of man, 
whose wings had so long beaten, bird-like, against the bars of 
its earthly cage, now began to feel that the bolts were slip- 
ping back in the doors of a larger future. 

The old order changeth, yielding place to new, 

And God fulfils Himself in many ways, 

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. 

When therefore without preface our Lord used the expression 
"the kingdom of God," He was as truly speaking in Nicodemus' 
idiom as if He had spoken casually of the weather. The king- 
dom of God, otherwise called the kingdom of Heaven — what 



ii8 THE LIFE INDEED 

is that? Evidently some new organized government wherein, 
as so long promised and prophesied, the will of God was to be 
the ultimate law, and wherein Heaven was to be the atmos- 
phere and environment of manhood life. What then was it — 
a thing coming to man, all made, and he needing only to be 
taken up supinely and soused into it, like the man at 
the Bethesda pool, or a thing to which man was to come, in the 
might of his long-ripening spirit, and enter on it like a prince 
taking possession of his inheritance, or like a youth assuming 
his majority? Our Lord's words, startling as they are, har- 
monize accurately with the long-promised transition from ser- 
vitude to sonship. Only, they conform to the true evolutionary 
order by making this not an affair of political counsel and 
legislation but a new birth, a second birth. "Verily, verily, I 
say unto thee, Except a man be born again" — dvcoOev^ 
again, or from above, or both? — "he cannot see the kingdom 
of God"; cannot so much as see it, let alone enter it, though 
it stand as plain as the Bunker Hill monument right before 
his eyes. You see how our ever-present question of light, of 
having eyes to see and use the light, comes into the case. Be 
born with eyes, above the brute's and worldling's eyes, and 
then you can see. And when Nicodemus' question tries to 
befog the matter, "How can a man be born when he is old?" 
our Lord's further assertion assumes the more illuminate 
idiom, assuring him that man must be born not of blood, nor 
of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God: 
"Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water 
and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." 
Born of water — what is that? Water is the natural symbol 
of purity, of cleanness; and is not cleanness from sin and the 
soilure of earth the thing after which law has struggled so 
long, and struggled in vain? You cannot legislate cleanness, 
cannot get it by volumes and libraries and worlds full of rules 
and codes. You must be born of a cosmos of purity, that 
purity of heart wherein a man sees God; must be saturated 
and enveloped with that bath of cleanness which comes only 
by way of the inner nature; and the rest follows, by vital con- 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 119 

sequence. ''He that is bathed," as our Lord says later, 
"needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit"; 
the disposal of the daily soilure, as he goes about his worldly 
ways, is an easily adjusted matter then. Born of the Spirit — 
what is that? What Spirit? for our Lord adds no qualifying 
or limiting adjective, not even a definite article; it is ''born 
of water and spirit," as if there were but one element, whether 
in man or in the world or in heaven, that could be so called. 
No dissociation of elements here, such as we inveterately 
make; as if there were two things to reconcile: an evil spirit 
in man, and a Holy Spirit outside of him, always more or less 
at cross purposes. Whatever truth there is in this idea will 
come out afterward; here it is ignored; here too the idea, like 
that of v/ater, seems to be both literal and figurative, for the 
word for spirit, irvevixa is taken from nature, meaning 
literally wind, so that in the sense vocabulary He is saying, 
"born of water and wind." But we can no more let it stay 
literal than we can the idea of water. And just as the phrase 
"born of water," of cleanness, solves the ideal of the old order, 
so the phrase "born of wind," of spirit, opens and makes viable 
the ideal of the new order. It names the one means of en- 
trance into the deepest world order; the cosmos, the universe, 
of spiritual powers and values, which are beneath and behind 
and within all that is. "God is spirit," the same Teacher says 
later; just as He says God is light, God is love; "and they 
that worship Him" — they that feel and acknowledge His su- 
premacy, His worth-ship — "must worship Him in spirit and 
in truth." Be born into the boundless element of spirit, and 
forthwith you find that your bondage to the lower world is 
gone; for you become aware that out there in the abyss of 
light and mystery "the Spirit itself beareth witness with our 
spirit, that we are the children of God." We have spoken of 
the spirit of man and its dim crude reactions on the sum of 
things; here it has become consciously identified with the 
spirit of the universe, so that one will, one freedom, animates 
them both. Being born into the spiritual family, we thence- 
forth live spontaneously as to the manner born, have the large 



I20 THE LIFE INDEED 

family interests at heart, being thenceforth workers together 
with God. A simple elementary matter this, as our Lord makes 
it out; He even intimates that in speaking of it He is speaking 
of earthly things. "If I have told you earthly things," He 
says, "and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you 
of heavenly things? That which is born of the flesh is flesh; 
and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." That ought to 
be obvious to anyone, even to a legalized master of Israel; it 
belongs to the very A B C oi things; "Marvel not that I said 
unto thee. Ye must be born again." The fact, from His point 
of view, stationed as He is on the upper and illuminate side, 
is self-evidencing. 

Then He goes on to explain, to this man whose ideals are 
still groping along the under side, what a man spiritually born 
is like, how we can tell that a new life is pulsating in him, 
whether we understand it or not. For this purpose He goes 
back to the natural phenomena of the wind, which He is dis- 
engaging from their merely physical motions and pressing into 
His new sphere of spiritual fact. This is what we must needs 
do; our thoughts ascend to spirit from sense, to the unseen 
from the realm of the seen. And I want you to note carefully 
what characteristics of the wind He uses. "The wind bloweth 
where it listeth" — that is, it is the one natural symbol of 
perfect, self-directive, self-poised freedom; "and thou hearest 
the sound thereof" — that is, you know it is there and is real, 
by its actual palpable effects; "but canst not tell whence it 
Cometh, and whither it goeth" — that is, the source and goal 
of it, as you stand outside of it, hearing it, swayed by it in 
a way, are as absolutely inexplicable to you as if it were a thing 
of another world. There is one of the commonest phenomena 
of nature that you really know nothing about, any more than 
you know about the real inwardness of electricity, or mag- 
netism, or light. It is there, and it has its world, and you can 
to a degree utilize its effects; but so far as you are concerned, 
its will is its own, not yours at all. Well, says Jesus, this is the 
character of the spiritual life; "so is every one that is born 
of the Spirit." I think our commentators have done their best 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 121 

to befog this latter assertion. They say it means, so it is with 
every one that is born of the Spirit; that is, that the Spirit, so 
to say, takes him up and whirls him through the air, willy-nilly, 
and he has no idea what it all means, where his new life is from 
or whither bound, but is just swept along on an inexplicable 
current of being. This explanation, as you see, takes away all 
his free-will, all his initiative, all his self-directive light of life, 
and leaves him a more helpless automaton than ever. In other 
words, it makes the divine spirit everything, the human spirit 
nothing; and so the dissociation of divine and human is re- 
duced by practically annihilating, or absorbing, the human. 
And this in the face of the plainest assertion, that the spiritu- 
ally born himself, not his environment, is in all these charac- 
teristics like the wind. Nay, the assertion is further 
reenforced. ''Thou canst not tell the whence and the whither," 
says our Lord, and He is speaking to a bemuddled Jew. Does 
He mean, nobody can tell? Why, almost immediately He 
says, "We speak that we do know, and testify that we have 
seen." Who are ''we"? Is He not speaking in the name of 
all who are born of the Spirit? Who else can the "we" be? 
He identifies Himself with those who have been born again; 
uses their emancipated consciousness, gives for all time their 
marvelous testimony to their sense of new life. "He that is 
spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. 
For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may in- 
struct him? But we have the mind of Christ." And here is 
the mind of Christ, making the pioneer revelation of the new 
life to which the adult manhood is born. 

"Thou canst not tell; we speak that we do know." How 
far this transition of spiritual birth has brought us, and how 
truly it is an access of light as well as of life, we can realize by 
comparing with our Lord's assertion the already quoted words 
of Koheleth written in the midst of the twilight period. 
"Everything," the sage says, "hath He made beautiful in its 
time; also He hath put eternity in their heart; — yet not so 
that man findeth out the work which God hath wrought, from 
the beginning, and to the end." He is speaking in the cosmic 



122 THE LIFE INDEED 

consciousness, and voicing the cosmic dimness of vision. In 
this stratum of things his words remain as true now as ever. 
But all the while, being spiritually sensitive, he is aware of 
an unresolved element which his cosmic standard cannot meas- 
ure; as inexplicable to that level of being as was the wind to 
Nicodemus, yet also just as real in its effects; the element, 
namely, of eternity, in the heart, bearing us on from an un- 
known spring to an unknown ocean of being. The vision is 
becoming clearer now, not too dim now but too glorious for 
our eyes to see; for it makes all the difference, the conscious- 
ness that we are born of the ultimate world order, and can 
feel and know the life of that Spirit whose first word was ^'Let 
there be light," and can look forward in congenial spirit to the 
far- withdrawn summit where dwelleth He ''who only hath im- 
mortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach 
unto." The feeling of such whence and whither we can store 
joyously in our growing manhood, when we know that the full 
realization is precluded only by our own finiteness. 

We are ready now, in the idiom of our evolutionary ideal, 
to raise Nicodemus' question anew, ''How can these things be?" 
to inquire whether this second birth is to be referred to an un- 
motived irruption and miracle from without, or whether it 
comes through the development and illumination of forces al- 
ready stored in the deep heart of manhood. But first, taking 
the scripture idea on its own ground, we must heed our Lord's 
word that this thing can be seen only from the upper and spir- 
itual side. Perhaps that is another way of saying that in order 
to know the spiritual life one must live it; then he has all his 
subject of study within himself, his heart, with all that com- 
munion and interchange of life values which he shares con- 
sciously with the living source. At any rate, it is from this 
upper side, however wonderful, that we have the warrant for 
approaching it. We will bear in mind what has been said, that 
we are working in the stratum of life where evolution has be- 
come personal and conscious of itself; where therefore the 
spirit of man is learning to cooperate wisely with a Spirit like 
his own, but boundless and universal, learning to embody on 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 123 

his own scale and in his limits the Will which determines all, 
recognized and worshipped as 

A motion and a spirit that impels 

All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 

And rolls through all things. 

In other words, his growing insight has come to recognize the 
source and first impact of evolution not as mechanical, blind, 
as it were fortuitous, but as wise, intelligent, and closing in 
itself attributes not less high than the highest that man finds in 
his own potencies and ideals. If evolution must be matched 
with involution, and man is a product of it, then surely the 
source and initiative, with the tremendous potencies lying cap- 
sulate within it, must be as great not only as its highest 
product man is, but as he can ever hope to be. The glory of 
the beginning can be estimated only by the glory of the end, 
where the finished structure crowns the whole work. The unit 
of measure is not the atom but the God. And as we see man 
plodding along the way, sloughing off his weakness, his igno- 
rance, his imperfections, and growing in Godlikeness, just ac- 
cording as his spirit sees and responds to the unseen, who shall 
set the limit? 

The great quarrel, as you know, which has hitherto raged 
between science and theology, has centred round the question 
whether our universe is a product of evolution or of special 
creation; whether its complex organism has risen through the 
steady development of things in obedience to laws and energies 
stored within, or through miraculous interference here and 
there from without, injecting as it were a new and unpromised 
energy and setting law at defiance. It is a dispute about the 
manner in which things have been brought about; for the 
wonder of the things themselves is before our eyes, an amazing 
pageant of glory, as great as if nothing but miracle were con- 
cerned in them. The question comes up with special insistence 
here, because in all our series of wonders this so-called second 
birth is the thing that looks most like a special creation, most 
as if the shaping hand of God Himself were laid bare. If we 



124 THE LIFE INDEED 

can understand this, then, having the clue to the hardest and 
highest phenomenon, we have the key to the whole series. 

May it not turn out that the whole dispute is the old one 
of the two sides of the shield? If this second birth were proved 
to be a special creation, would it necessarily disprove the other 
alternative? Or is there any alternative at all? It may merely 
prove that at every step of evolution there are just as many 
unseen forces as seen, a whole world full of both, each coming 
from its own sphere upper or under, and all working together 
to one large result; which result here at this second birth has 
reached the point where it so declares itself, so takes into 
partnership the spirit of man and the spirit of God, that for 
the first time we can begin to see things as they are. It is 
the coming of life to light, so that we become aware of the 
real law of the spirit of life. Here then is the unit of evolution. 
This is the view I am disposed to take of it. If evolution be- 
gan with personal spiritual energy, then, it would seem, there 
must come a point in the series where person shall be revealed 
to person, where spirit shall spring to meet spirit; and so the 
creation, being endowed with a mind of its own, may become 
intelligently aware not only of its Creator but of the real in- 
wardness of its own nature and of its trend through the 
eternities. And it is in the second birth, if anywhere, that this 
light of life bursts forth. 

On this line — on the line laid down by our Lord's definition 
— let us try to trace it a little way. 

Let us begin with the most estranging feature, the fact that 
to men of the Nicodemus type, whose spirit is set in the lower 
legalistic key, the birth into a new world of free spirit is ab- 
solutely inconceivable; they can no more realize it than we 
can hear the music of the spheres, which was fabled to be so 
far above our gamut of sound that our ears could not take it 
in; or than we can see the ultra-violet rays of the spectrum, 
which yet are there, working their finer effect, in a light un- 
approachable to our sense. And indeed these casual illustra- 
tions launch us into the heart of our subject. They remind 
us that in many spheres, perhaps in every sphere of life and 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 125 

thought, we are midway in a scale and gamut of things which 
in both directions extends infinitely beyond us; and our Lord's 
assertion is but His way of saying that the second birth intro- 
duces us to a sphere of life-values beyond sense, beyond even 
logic and reasoning. St. Paul says virtually the same thing, 
in his assertion that ''Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither 
have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath 
prepared for them that love him; but God hath revealed them 
unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea 
the deep things of God"; and even this assertion, as he says, 
is already written in phophecy, in Isaiah's words: 'Tor since 
the beginning of the world men have not heard, nor perceived 
by the ear, neither hath the eye seen, O God, beside thee, what 
he hath prepared for him that waiteth for him." Here is the 
waiting for it on the one side, in prophetic dimness, and the 
record of actual fulfilment on the other. Manhood has risen 
in the scale, beyond the point that was such a barrier to Nico- 
demus. But must we desert our evolutionary analogy here, 
and betake ourselves to miracle, to a special and unmotived 
creation? Scientists have long been trying to make out that 
in that vast scale of life which sweeps from the protoplasmic 
cell upward there is an equable and uniform progress, that 
somehow, if we could but find it, height melts into height, and 
species into species, with all the connecting links somehow 
traceable and calculable; and they have been impatient of any 
other conception of things. But you know too how recently 
Professor De Vries has brought that notion into doubt, by 
showing that nature advances not in that equable way but by 
sudden leaps and metamorphoses, which he calls mutations; 
so that many a time suddenly, and by some inexplicable 
agency, a new species appears; and he says the scientific 
"battle now rages about the question whether these strange 
mutations are to be regarded as the principal means of evolu- 
tion, or whether slow and gradual changes have not also played 
a large and important part." You will recall too what I quoted 
from Professor Shaler: his remark about a certain instance he 
gave which he said was "one of many, very many, instances in 



126 THE LIFE INDEED 

which we find the apparently uniform processes of Nature, 
those which are indeed uniform in their steps of action, leading 
to sudden and complete changes of result." Why, even mathe- 
matics has ciphered out the abstract possibility of all this, in 
its theory of the fourth dimension. Suppose, it says, a being 
whose whole life of sense and action moved in a world of only 
two dimensions, length and breadth. All you have to do is 
to lift that being up, adding the third dimension of height, and 
at once it can look down upon its former world, and look in- 
side of its own nature, as it never could before. The third 
dimension, simple as it was, had been absolutely inconceivable 
to it, until it was actually transferred thereto. Now, says 
mathematics, there is no abstract reason why we should not 
go on adding new dimensions to the three we already know, and 
as a consequence be able to see inward, penetrate within our 
world and nature, as we cannot begin to conceive now; and 
yet, as Nicodemus says, ^^How can these things be?" 

Now this second birth, as our Lord describes it and as St. 
Paul gives its consequences, has all the marks of one of those 
sudden mutations in great Nature which are perfectly obvious 
as seen from the upper side, but from the under side are as 
inconceivable as is the organic world to the inorganic, as is the 
animal to the plant, as is the human to the animal. In fact, 
this is the supreme mutation; the nodal point in manhood de- 
velopment where all at once the landscape of life becomes il- 
luminate, and that fulness of life, that redemption of the body 
for which the whole creation has groaned and travailed in pain 
together until now, comes into the field of vision. Passing 
wonderful it is, I grant you; the glory of it dazzles us as much 
as it did Nicodemus; but it is not my speculation, it is the 
absolute assertion and tissue of the Bible idea, and it has all 
the consistency of the highest evolutionary science. 

The supreme mutation, I have just said, is this marvelous 
birth into the sphere of spirit; the highest change that our 
earthly vision can see ; yet put before us as so much a matter of 
course that our Lord says of it, ''Marvel not that I said unto 
thee, Ye must be born again." And indeed our foregoing 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 127 

studies have shown us the elements that have led up to it; have 
revealed that it is not an unmotived miracle but that, as Pro- 
fessor De Vries puts it, slow and gradual changes have also 
played a large and important part. And now, as to the mo- 
ment of transition from the long gestation of the ages to the 
sudden new life, or as we may now call it the shock of manhood 
mutation, you have noted that the first element our Lord gives 
of it is, the sense and atmosphere of absolute freedom: "the 
wind bloweth where it listeth, . . . so is every one that is 
born of wind, of spirit." It is, as it were, a sudden opening of 
doors into a larger place, the sudden coming into breath, and 
light, and song, and joy. Have you ever noticed how our Lord 
described what He was on earth for, and how much He made 
of this element of disimprisonment? "The Spirit of the Lord 
is upon me," He said in the sjmagogue of Nazareth, "because 
He hath anointed me to preach . . . deliverance to the cap- 
tives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty 
them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the 
Lord." He was reading this, quoting it from the Scripture al- 
ready in their hands; already the ideal had been sown by 
prophecy into the heart of manhood; "he hath anointed me," 
Isaiah had said, "to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the 
opening of the prison to them that are bound." You re- 
member, too, how later, when our Lord in his parable of judg- 
ment gave the principles on which men should be eternally 
blessed of the Father; among these was "I — that is, every 
least one of these my brethren — was in prison, and ye came 
unto me." Nay, his apostles would not let this element of His 
ministry cease even with His death, but imaged Him as still 
preaching to the spirits in prison, who in the old Noachic days 
had perished without law in the blind excess of animalism. 
What a vast jail-delivery, when we come to think of it, the 
scripture ideal rolls up around this mutation, this nodal transi- 
tion of manhood growth ! How this second birth seems to open 
the boundless realm of being and doing exactly what we will, 
going and coming, working and rejoicing, as the emancipate 
spirit dictates! It is even so, as St. Paul says: "The law of 



128 THE LIFE INDEED 

the spirit of life hath made me free from the law of sin and 
death." We have not received the spirit of bondage, again 
to fear, but the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, 
Father. When the spirit of man recognizes the Father of 
spirits, and springs filially to meet the source of its evolutionary 
life, then farewell forever to the old alien pressure of law, to 
the old groaning and passiveness under a burden of fate and 
death; the law of our being is henceforth ours to use, not to 
be used and enslaved by. ^Tor God hath not given us the 
spirit of fear," writes St. Paul to Timothy, "but of power, and 
of love, and of a sound mind." Is not this, in compendium, 
the birth of a completed manhood, wherein will and affection 
and intellect, the whole inner man, stands forth master of his 
world and his fate? 

But here perhaps the question rises. Why a second birth? 
Why, instead of coinciding with our first birth into the world, 
and so an experience in which apart from our volition we find 
ourselves all transported and naturalized, it has to be brought 
about with such travail-pangs of creation, and after so long 
gestation in the underworld of being? Well, as soon as it is 
propounded, with its elements in order before us, the question 
answers itself. The birth is a second birth because it belongs 
to the manhood stratum wherein our evolution has become 
self-conscious and personal, and we cooperate freely with it, 
to do our eager share in bringing its consummation. How 
could this be with our animal birth? That was a thing beyond 
our will, beyond our choice, beyond our knowledge. We did 
not ask to be brought here. It came about, as it were, in the 
reflex and automatic order of things, in the order that Pro- 
fessor Cope tries to explain with his theories of archsestheti- 
cism and katagenesis; a birth, like all animal birth, into the 
species and the race and the material environment. But this 
second birth must needs supervene at a point higher up, where 
two elements can work together, the element of an appealing 
and vitalizing spirit from the unseen, and the element of glad 
free human choice, the spirit of manhood, rising to meet it. 
Being of the spirit, it is the birth into freedom; it is the soii| 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 129 

emerging from its prison into the open air of liberty and light 
and love. Why, it must be so: this birth, from the very na- 
ture of the case, must be a birth wherein the spirit is awake, 
and knows what it does, and makes for itself individual choice 
of its life and destiny. This is the essential characteristic 
that makes it so truly not a mere natural and as it were animal 
growth but a marvelous mutation which seems to open a com- 
plete reversal of life conditions. 

And here we see, in another light, its real evolutionary sig- 
nificance. What we are contemplating, in the large, is that 
momentous point of history and growth, the emergence of the 
full-orbed, full-functioned individual. To this, after all, our 
period of gestation, our twilight period, has all the while been 
leading. It is the great culminating point in earthly evolution. 
You recall Professor Shaler's words: ''It is hardly too much 
to say that on this individualizing process depends all the real 
work that is done within the universe." We can realize this 
now, both in the history we have traced and in our own per- 
sonality. We have seen the spirit of man reacting on the law 
of the species ; gradually enlarging it from the unit organism to 
the family, from the family to the clan, from the clan to the 
tribe, from the tribe to the nation, from the nation to the race. 
We have seen how the Jew, to whom was entrusted the care 
of this spiritual expansion, stuck fast at the race, and would 
no farther. The last step was too bold, too much an opening 
of his soul to all the universe for him willingly to take; he 
preferred to remain exclusive. But in ourselves, too, we know 
how it is : what stern bonds our species, our race, our age, our 
climatic temperament, our work, our wealth or penury, have 
bound us in; it is only in strictest limits, it would seem, that 
we can do the thing we would. How far are we, in sympathy, 
even yet, even we who have named the name of Christ, beyond 
old Dr. Johnson's surly remark, "For aught I can see, all 
foreigners are fools"? Then too, how sadly we are aware of 
the law of sin in our members, warring against the law of the 
mind. All this is a bar and discount to our free individuality: 
we are, so far forth, only levers and bolts and cog-wheels in 



I30 THE LIFE INDEED 

a colossal world machine, wherein our free play of personality 
is hemmed in by tempers, customs, conventions, congealed 
codes of social law. We need, after all, simply to submit our- 
selves to that highest and freest impulse, to that inviting plane 
of being prophesied by the whole spiritual surge of the ages, 
whereon our individual self is at last free, whereon every man 
and every created thing in its degree is as it were a second 
self, with its own rights and life, and our soul, emancipated 
from the narrowing prison of the species, "lies," as Browning 
puts it, "bare to the universal prick of light." Here is the 
strange paradox of the whole mutation, that just when the in- 
dividual seems turned most out of doors, just then his indi- 
viduality is most truly born into the unitary life of the 
universe. 

But here you say, "If the higher evolution is a movement 
toward individuality, if the vast forces of the universe have all 
along been in travail-pangs to get the completed individual 
personality born, what becomes of our social organism?" Ever 
since the French Revolution the generations have been desper- 
ately at work on that problem: how to bring about a social 
order wherein liberty, equality, and fraternity shall have free 
and full course. Haven't we had enough of individual self- 
assertion, and has it not proved merely that the spirit of man 
may thereby become only the more arbitrary and oppressive, 
only the more shrewd and venomous to work his cleverer will 
against his fellow-man? Do we not need rather to melt and 
flow together into one great organism of humanity, wherein 
each individual soul shall get its rights and the free play of 
life, and wherein the individual units shall have disappeared in 
the welfare of the whole? Of individual self-assertion and 
self-containment, I answer, we have had enough and more 
than enough; it is no recent thing, the world has always had 
it. And in this new social movement it is by no means 
quenched; in fact it has a larger field, albeit furtive and 
hidden, than ever. But you see men are trying to get their 
kind corralled and bondaged under the same old regime of law; 
trying to legislate their race into loving each other and allowing 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 131 

each other their rights. Like the Galatians they will not stand 
fast in the liberty wherewith Christ would make them free, 
but are desperately set on becoming entangled again with the 
yoke of bondage. Our second birth, our mystic birth into full 
individuality, clears all this up, if we will but choose and en- 
sue the full power of it. For it is the birth of the free Godlike 
unit of society. The fulness of the time, in its slow coming, 
has kept it back, just as Koheleth kept back the vision of im- 
mortality, until there should be born a personality, an indi- 
vidual, fit to wield this perilous weapon of freedom. If society 
starts from and nucleates in this new-born individuality as a 
unit, then it is sound and free and Godlike all the way through. 
And only so can it ever be such, strive and legislate and civilize 
how men may. The kingdom of law can never melt into the 
one livable kingdom, the kingdom of grace and truth. We 
must be born again even to see it; must be born of water and 
spirit to enter its gates at all. So to His little audience of 
disciples, eager men learning to be individual units in the great 
universe of life, our Lord says, It is not an affair of discovery 
and legislation of which men say, Lo here, lo there; the king- 
dom of heaven, being a thing to which you are born, is within 
you. And when He simplified the idea, by telling in parable 
what it is like. He said it is like leaven, which a woman took 
and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened. 
There is the real sinking of individuality requisite for the vital- 
ization of society: wherein every protoplasmic grain, with its 
free individuality in active and vital energy, is spreading the 
spirit of God from heart to heart till the whole mass is leavened 
and light and joyous, like its unseen source of life, through 
and through. The individual is brought out from the species 
in order that manhood henceforth may no more be 
a dead machine, worked by rules and conventions of alien will 
and prescription, but saturated, as it were, and tingling in 
every part, with the free spirit of God and man. 

Friends, ^ur topic is so large and glorious that it seems never 
to let go. But I must say of it only one more thing. Our 
discussion of things hitherto compels us to enlarge our view 



132 THE LIFE INDEED 

of the second birth into wellnigh boundless dimensions; we 
must rise to an unprecedented height, to cosmic and universal 
scale, to take it in. It is not a mere ecclesiastical affair; not 
a mere affair of getting a few individuals out of the world into 
the church; though indeed we must not discard this, for it is 
the way Christ took. But as a church we must enlarge our 
purview, our instrumentalities, our quickening promise to the 
souls in our care. If not we, who then is there to do it? But 
we must walk in the largeness of the law of the spirit of life, 
into which because we see we know that we are new-born; 
recognizing that birth as the temp oris partus maximus, the 
birth of manhood after its longer period of gestation and 
placental growth, as the marvelous event wherein the true 
meaning of evolution declares itself. Who is sufficient to these 
things? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. We 
have the mind of Christ; we have the instrumentality to our 
hands. 



II. THE OUTWARD CURRENT 

But after all, this second birth of manhood, full of bound- 
less promise though it be, is only a birth; only an initial point, 
a beginning to live; and the whole mounting course of the new 
life, all that gives it thrust and character and adultness, lies 
yet beyond. In fact we have not yet discovered the real prin- 
ciple and essence of this higher stage of personality, any more 
than we have seen, or can see, in the new-born infant, how its 
individual bent and endowment are going to develop. I do 
not wonder that at this point of our study you shake your 
heads and say, ''Well, I must think it over." We are still on 
the threshold; the law of the spirit of life is yet to be revealed. 

I think some of our churches make a mistake here, or rather 
unduly limit themselves, by laying so much relative stress on 
the moment of new birth, as if all their work and responsibility 
were over as soon as they have got souls converted. The New 
Testament way is rather to put its strength into the wealth 
of being that ensues when the new birth is taken for granted. 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 133 

Where else, save in this third chapter of John, is this crisis 
point, this emergence of the free spirit of Hfe, so rigorously 
demanded and defined; yet where, in the whole New Testa- 
ment, is it not presupposed, as if it were to be treated as an 
accomplished fact, determining once for all the higher plane, 
the table-land, on which henceforth manhood life is to move? 
As far as concerns a Nicodemus, whose being is keyed to the 
old dispensation of living by rule and law, as far as concerns 
every one whose life is nothing but moral, this mystic entrance 
upon the life of the spirit is an absolute prerequisite to further 
evolution. As concerns the Christian, moving spontaneously 
in the new environment and atmosphere, why, he was born so, 
and that is the end of it. When and how that birth occurred 
is of course another matter; but that it consciously occurred, 
and with full acceptance of the situation, is a thing taken for 
granted and no more said. To treat the event as if it were 
always in uncertain abeyance, or as if the soul thus born were 
always to be held back by main force and constant revival from 
lapsing into a pre-natal state, is neither of logic nor of science 
nor of faith. 

But as I said, it is only a birth: that is why we can afford 
to forget, or rather presuppose it, as we do our bodily birth, 
while we concentrate our energies on the things that really 
count, that consort with it. What these things essentially are, 
we are now to note; but first let us glance again, in summary 
fashion, at what this second birth has and has not contributed 
to the Life Indeed. 

What to this point has stood out most prominently in its 
contribution to life is emancipation. By it the individual unit 
of the higher evolution, the vital molecule, so to say, has be- 
come a centre of spiritual force, free to choose and work its 
work on the individual at its side, and to receive returns of 
influence from it; each so becoming a thinking active grain of 
leaven, and all vitalized by a spirit which, ^'infused through 
the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies 
every part . . . even down to the minutest member." This 
is a tremendous point gained. And it can be gained only by 



134 "THE LIFE INDEED 

such freedom of wisdom and action; by making each unit a 
vital centre in the tissue, or as St. Peter, who wrote before the 
days of biology, figures it, a ''lively stone" in the vast edifice 
of life. 

But when you come to think of it, freedom is a negative, 
colorless thing; perilous too, beyond computation, unless there 
is something sterling behind it. To present a man with free- 
dom is like presenting him with a blank sheet of paper, on 
which he can write any record he pleases. Nothing has been 
so abused, or so awkwardly handled, as liberty. ''O Liberty!" 
you remember was exclaimed in the French Revolution, ''what 
crimes are committed in thy name!" And hardly less grave 
than the crimes of liberty is the unwisdom that so easily besets 
it, not to speak of the pinches of downright tyranny and in- 
tolerance. How hard it is both to live and let live ! How many 
a man, too, whose spirit is emancipated, who rejoices in the 
law of liberty after the inner man, becomes enslaved again, be- 
fore he knows it, to some new order of bondage: some doubtful 
business enterprise, or soulless corporation, or tyrannous 
union, in which the individuality that is new-born in him is 
lost and belied. You remember how Bunyan said that the 
second part of the Valley of the Shadow of Death was, if pos- 
sible, more beset with dangers than the first; only they were 
dangers of another kind, not the ditch and quag now, but 
snares and traps and pitfalls, in which the unwary soul, or the 
soul without daylight, was sure to be caught. Clearly, freedom 
of itself is a doubtful blessing. It was not made to go alone. 
What then shall go with it, to safeguard it, keeping it from 
lapsing either into another slavery or into wild anarchy? Can 
the spirit of man, after all, be trusted with so perilous a gift? 
Can the law of the spirit of life function as a real law, a con- 
servator of order and wisdom, and not a fluid, arbitrary, ca- 
pricious wilfulness? If not, then the fulness of time is here 
in vain; and evolution has come all this way to go to pieces 
at the end. 

Here, friends, at last, is the time and the place to name the 
solution of the whole boundless problem, the supreme pulsa- 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 135 

tion of the Life Indeed. I have kept it back, running the risk 
of vagueness and dim inklings of the matter until I could trace 
all the broad steps of reason and science that led up to it; I 
wanted you in some just degree to realize how great it is, this 
keystone of the arch, when it falls into its ordained place. The 
safeguard of the new-born freedom, the fulfiller of the law, the 
proof that the spirit of man is in its heart of hearts sound and 
sterling, the guarantee of an evolution that grows onward to 
the light unapproachable, is — LOVE. The spirit that long 
ago brooded on the face of the waters and the human spirit, 
that step by step rose to find its unseen witnessing and thereby 
advanced steadily toward light and liberty, have in this mighty 
pulsation of love, or grace, as the Scripture calls it, declared 
themselves to the worlds and the eternities; and we have the 
final opening of the mystery now, the mystery that was hid 
from ages and generations. What was that vital motion in- 
fused through the vast evolutionary mass, we have been asking, 
and no answer could give the whole key to it. Not mere arbi- 
trary power and will; not that, for man found in his heart an 
excellence greater than that, a human worth against which 
mere power, with all its tyrannous potencies, was weakness 
itself. Not mere wisdom, the infinite knowledge which adapted 
means to ends, and brought a world-order and beauty into 
being; not that, for the spirit of man found that wisdom itself 
must bow to a mightier master, else its many inventions would 
go hopelessly astray; not the absoluteness of mere justice and 
judgment; not that, for in every tract of that hard heartless 
empire which such governance would engender must be left 
open and available a still larger area of mercy, allowance, for- 
giveness. Somehow, in the midst of his twilight of law and 
growing wisdom and sense of infinite power, the spirit of man 
was borne onward toward the conviction that to know all was 
not to punish all but to forgive all. After all, we are not the 
culprits of God, not the quarry slaves of God, but the sons of 
God; and the vital pulsation that courses back and forth be- 
tween us and the Father of spirits is the communion of that 
love whose expression is fatherhood and sonship. This is the 



136 THE LIFE INDEED 

illuminate and determining hemisphere of the tremendous map 
of life^ the central character which forever sets off the new dis- 
pensation of things over against the old. 'The law/' as St. 
John defines it, ''was given by Moses; but grace and truth 
came by Jesus Christ." When this revelation was made, men 
began to live; and the world, by a divinely inspired instinct, 
has numbered its years from that date, nineteen full centuries 
now, during which, eagerly exploring its various potencies, 
men have hardly yet begun to sound its depths and are lagging 
far behind the unspeakable heights of it. Why, here is work 
cut out for an eternity: just to realize and embody, to spread 
and naturalize, the endless potentialities of love. 

Love, in that central pulsation which is the heart of love, 
namely, unbought undeserved grace, is the supreme and ab- 
solutely new contribution of the fulness of the time to the 
wealth of the world. Nothing like it, except as dim and 
sporadic adumbrations of it, was ever named and naturalized 
among men before. "The real difference between Paganism 
and Christianity," says G. K. Chesterton, "is perfectly 
summed up in the difference between the pagan, or natural, 
virtues, and those three virtues of Christianity which the 
Church of Rome calls virtues of grace. The pagan, or rational, 
virtues are such things as justice and temperance, and Christi- 
anity has adopted them. The three mystical virtues which 
Christianity has not adopted, but invented, are faith, hope, and 
charity" — or as we better translate, love; and as St. Paul 
says, the greatest of these is love. "Behold," says Isaiah, "the 
former things are come to pass" — shall we not say the former 
ideals of justice and temperance? — "and new things do I de- 
clare: before they spring forth I tell you of them. . . .Be- 
hold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye 
not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and 
rivers in the desert." I shall have further occasion to quote 
how Mr. Chesterton sets forth the uniqueness of these virtues 
of grace; here I merely record the distinction, that you may 
have it as a point de repere to bear in mind; that you may 
know once for all what was the real meaning of things when, 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 137 

at the end of days the Lord rose up and was wroth, as the 
prophet put it, that he might do his work, his strange work, 
and bring to pass his act, his strange act. It was the evolu- 
tion of grace, in the heart of manhood. With this in mind 
our business now is, to fit this in, if we may, to our adopted 
evolutionary framework. 

All along we have been aware, through the pre-Christian 
ages, of a vague prevailing sense of something lacking. The 
spirit of man could not rest in its manhood attainment; it 
recognized its manhood as incomplete, its supreme prophetic 
vision was of a coming manhood, in which man could see and 
be what he deeply felt it in him to be. This is not speculation 
or philosophy; it is recorded fact; we have that actual pro- 
phetic pulsation of the human spirit to reckon with. Nor is 
it ancient history alone; it is the present experience of the 
finest, deepest-seeing poetic souls. In a world full of beauty 
and splendor, of work and achievement, of ideals of justice and 
self-control, yet the key of things was so conspicuously lacking 
that to many a sensitive heart all seemed, as to Hamlet, "a 
foul and pestilent congregation of vapours." You remember 
how Browning has put this into a poem, and supplied the key. 
"Wanting," he says, — 

Wanting is — what? 

Summer redundant, 

Blueness abundant, 

— Where is the blot? 
Beamy the world, yet a blank all the same, 
— Framework which waits for a picture to frame: 
What of the leafage, what of the flower? 
Roses embowering with naught they embower! 
Come then, complete incompletion, O comer. 
Pant through the blueness, perfect the summer! 

Breathe but one breath 

Rose-beauty above. 

And all that was death 

Grows life, grows love, 
Grows love! 

This, you say, is a poet's dream, not science. Well, then 
let us interrogate art. Did you ever see that wonderful pic- 



138 THE LIFE INDEED 

ture of Albrecht Diirer's, on which he inscribed the word 
''melancholia"? Diirer, you know, was the friend of Luther 
and Melanchthon and Erasmus, a man of whom was said, 
"His least merit was his art"; and he made this picture in 15 14, 
seven years before Luther's great confession at Worms, at a 
time when the Revival of Learning, then in full sway, was able, 
as man had not been since Christ, to record the marvelous 
energies and achievements of the spirit of man. This picture, 
the verdict of the greatest master of the German renaissance 
on his day, portrays at once its greatness and its sad futility. 
A female winged figure, the very embodiment of human wis- 
dom and might, her head crowned with the laurel, and with 
keys and a great purse at her girdle, sits at the foot of a half- 
built tower, whose unfinished top is out of sight beyond the 
picture. It is done as far as the first string course, the base- 
ment story, so to say; and on one wall of it hang the even- 
balanced scales of justice, on the other the hour-glass, its sands 
almost run, the passing-bell ready to ring the final hour, and 
the magic square which in every direction, vertically, horizon- 
tally, diagonally, foots up ever the same, the emblem, it would 
seem, of a rounded, self-contained life. The woman sits look- 
ing at a shapeless block of stone, and with a great pair of com- 
passes is evidently trying, but hopelessly as her countenance 
indicates, to plan how it may be fitted into the edifice above. 
There the ladder is, all ready, the refractory stone at the foot 
of it; but scattered on the ground lie the discarded instruments 
of art and research, the jagged and worn-out saw, the useless 
plane, the broken T-square, the idle hammer; while the sphere, 
the symbol of perfection, lies reproachfully at her feet, an un- 
approachable pattern, and the crucible beyond contains no 
secret of the ultimate elements of being. By her side on a 
large mill-stone — emblem, this stone, of grinding labor — sits 
a winged child with stylus and tablet, and the fringed cloth 
that makes its seat easier seems to tell of that contented spirit 
which rejoices in work as its portion; but the child is asleep 
over its reckoning, and at the foot of the stone lies a dog, also 
fast asleep. All betokens a stoppage and deadlock of achieve- 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 139 

ment; the woman only being awake, but awake to the most 
hopeless thoughts. Yet beyond, on the shore of the limitless 
ocean, is a prosperous city, with its stateliness, its marts, and 
the ships of commerce in its harbor; no indication here of 
human failure; while in the sky of the background the most 
conspicuous object, filling it all with its exaggerated rays, is 
what we hardly know whether to call a sun or a baleful comet, 
whether betokening glory or doom, an object left thus ambigu- 
ous, perhaps, of the artist's intent. But crossing its equivocal 
rays, firm and solid as if built into Nature, is the rainbow of 
promise; while flying away with a cry into the night, its back 
turned to sun and rainbow, is a strange bat-like creature bear- 
ing on its uncouth wings the legend "melancholia." Such is 
this speaking picture, eloquent in every smallest detail. What 
spirit of life shall break this deadlock and rouse the sleepers? 
Who shall square that shapeless block, shapeless but noble in 
size and texture, and fit it for its place in the edifice above? 
For that winged spirit of man has reached her limit of power ; 
earth's splendid resources are exhausted, and the tower is un- 
finished; if the game is to go on, a God, it would seem, must 
mingle with it. 

This picture of Diirer's, unlike Browning's poem, fails to 
vouchsafe any key to the situation. It portrays merely a 
standstill and an enigma. Even the winged child, if it is in- 
tended for the conventional figure of love, is merely love ab- 
sorbed in art and work, and it is asleep. A similar record of 
deadlock in the Bible, however, supplies, in the writer's own 
idiom, a hint of what is needed to clear the situation. I refer 
now to Koheleth, and his trenchant yet true assessment of his 
legalized, toil-ridden world. It is something, you know, to have 
reached the point where, whether we know the remedy or not, 
we can diagnose the disease. Well, this is what Koheleth did 
for his pre-Christian era. Like Goethe, — 

He took the suffering human race, 

He read each wound, each weakness clear; 

And struck his finger on the place, 

And said: Thou ailest here, and here! 



I40 THE LIFE INDEED 

Koheleth, you know, looks out into the world from much the 
same as Diirer's point of view, the point of view of labor and 
art, and cheerily bids man rejoice in his work; but at the end 
his verdict is, all vanity, futility, a chase after wind. It is 
the same verdict from the under side that St. Paul afterward 
pronounces from the upper, in saying that the creation was 
made subject to vanity, a vanity not of its own willing. St. 
Paul tells why; Koheleth merely puts his finger on the ailing 
spot, in his question, ''What profit hath man in all his labor, 
which he laboreth under the sun?" The thing that is lacking, 
in all this busy work, in all this ordered life, of the world, is 
profit, something to make the work worth doing, the life worth 
living. Koheleth, being not a modern scientist but a Jew, 
speaks in his Jewish idiom of business; but the fact that he 
immediately applies his question to the ongoings of nature and 
history indicates that by profit he has something more in mind 
than work and wages, or dollars and cents. The word means 
literally surplusage. What surplusage: what is there left over, 
when a man's work, when a generation's work, when the 
world's work is done? And you remember how the lack of 
surplusage in life is emphasized by his thought of things re- 
turning on themselves, like a great wheel that comes round 
full circle and starts again, ever again, but does not get for- 
ward; so that when you compare generations each with each 
there is nothing new under the sun. 

Such is Koheleth's picture of his world, comparable to 
Diirer's; I have spoken of it many times here, because to me 
it is the most fundamental and searching estimate of the old 
dispensation that exists; and besides it furnishes the evolu- 
tionary clue to the new birth that here takes place. Surplus- 
age; surplusage of life; vitality, as it were, liberated to excess, 
overflowing; life enough for the soul's own needs, and life to 
spare for the needs of others: that is what the dead-locked 
world needed, and what in the fulness of time it began to have. 
Koheleth had raised the inquiry "What surplusage?" and 
searching into life had found little shreds of it here and there, 
in wisdom, in the joy of the God-appointed work, in the faith 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 141 

which takes all chances. But he had not learned to give this 
overflow of life the right name; had not reached its innermost 
secret; and so his search for surplusage remained largely a 
thing of shreds and patches, nay pathetically small, compared 
with the immense reality. This we can see, as soon as the 
reality stands before us. When He who embodied it came, 
and told the world what He came for: after describing the 
earlier ones, who came and lived only for what they could get, 
He said of Himself: ''I am come that they might have life, 
and that they might have it more abundantly." His word 
is TrepLaaov, literally and exactly this idea of Koheleth's; 
— that they might have a surplus, an overflow of 
life. His whole attitude to life, and all the conduct He 
founded on it, was keyed to this idea of self-impartation: 
life imparted, flowing out like the waters of a fountain, work- 
ing to vitalize other lives; and not at all as a thing taken in, 
gloated over and made luxurious, or employed merely for what 
could be got out of it. This self-impartation of life, put into 
character, can mean nothing less, nothing other, than loving 
your fellow-man. Under law, you either work for wages or 
else try to dodge the penalty of transgression; that is about 
what it reduces to; and it is all a self-regarding, self-seeking, 
self-cultivating, and so inward-flowing current of spirit, which 
makes yourself the centre of your system. Under love all this 
is reversed; the spiritual current is outward, flowing to give 
life and joy and truth to other hearts; but you do not im- 
poverish, rather you enrich your own life thereby. You are 
a great deal more of a man than you were before; you have 
secured the supreme significance of manhood. In other words, 
you have all the life you need for your own uses and more, nay, 
becoming more as it spends itself; every pulsation of love for 
your fellow-man is a veritable overflow of life, from the vital- 
ized heart into the world. That is the reason why I entitle 
this section The Outward Current. From a living soul, as 
St. Paul expresses it, man has become a life-giving spirit; it 
is this reversed current of being that has made him so. 

Here I think we have an idea of life that fits into our evo- 



142 THE LIFE INDEED 

lutionary conception. It is the law of the spirit of life that at 
the critical point where manhood evolution merges into its 
highest and adult stage, there takes place what may be called 
a liberation of the Hfe-force to excess, an overflow of vitality; 
so that thenceforth the man is not merely self-contained and 
self-regarding, not merely a reservoir of vitality; but a foun- 
tain of vitality, a source of life and refreshment to the world, 
self-imparting and self-forgetting. This is the ideal, put in 
quasi-chemical terms. It is the supply of what Koheleth felt 
the lack of: the surplusage, which in his world was so doubt- 
ful, yet to his prophetic soul was so needful an element to 
progress. This elementary conception of it has many conno- 
tations: it has to be accommodated, in fact, to every dialect 
of life. We have spoken of the soul under tutelage of law, 
and with the sense of being a minor; well, here the majority 
bell has struck, and henceforth the soul is self-directive, a 
man among men. We have spoken of a pervading sense of 
bondage and fear; well, here the consciousness that fills the 
soul is the sense of freedom and confidence. We have spoken 
of the man whose individuality was baffled by his earthly and 
hereditary conditions; well, here the spirit that is in him has 
free course to pour itself forth spontaneously on the world 
and on the task; and the key to it all, its absolute guarantee 
of safety and sanity, is, that this overflow of a vitality derived 
from the spirit of God is just the emergence and pure impulse 
of love. In this all the stress and struggle after law, obedience, 
righteousness, and all the livable relations with the world, 
reaches its perfect and as it were natural solution. He that 
loves his neighbor works him no ill; therefore love is the ful- 
filling of the law. The ideal of fulfilment so long sought is 
reached at one easy bound, as soon as the spirit rays outward, 
as soon as love is in free play. But how crude and rudimental 
this fulfilling looks, by the side of what more love brings into 
life. Fulfilling of law is merely the negative and inert side of 
love — worketh no ill, virtually leaving neighbor alone — and 
yet the law, as such, is satisfied. But over against it put the 
whole new world of life values and activities, when the spirit, 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 143 

vitalized by love, overflows in good sympathies and good 
works, forgetting self, or rather finding its truest self-interest 
in the welfare of neighbor and the new-birth of a world. 

Such are the evolutionary aspects of the case; and while 
the contemplation of them throws light on the depths and in- 
volvements of being, yet fortunately the world did not have 
to wait for the era of scientific research to get its revelation 
of this profoundest truth of the world. We can get at it best, 
indeed, by attending to the limpid simplicities of the matter. 
Love is, after all, the great simplifier. When our Lord put 
before men the kingdom of God, to which men must be born, 
He treated that birth as a beginning of the simplest, sweetest 
things; and setting a child in the midst. He said that men 
must receive the kingdom of heaven as a little child. We can 
see why, when love is the light of our seeing. Simple and 
natural as it is, it is the mark of that growth of the spirit 
which we have already noted, wherein men dare to love and 
trust instead of to fear and fight. A little child, in its perfect 
openness of love and trust, is the bravest being in the world, 
brave because so unconscious of its courage, the bravest and 
the most overcoming. It has found the sublimely clear way 
to the conquest of the kingdom. Yes, the child on its mill- 
stone, asleep over its uncongenial work, must awake and be- 
come the dominating influence of the picture; and as it sends 
its ray of trustful love into the energies of things, and thus 
takes the helm of progress, the hard strained look will melt 
from that mighty spirit of man, and the compasses will strike 
the right line, and the shapeless block will round into the per- 
fect pattern, the completed sphere of character and destiny. 
No more a magic self-contained square, with the passing-bell 
already trembhng to strike above it, but the sphere of per- 
fected relations, heart to heart and man to man, ready for 
its place at the top of the ladder, where the tower goes up out 
of sight. Wagner, you know, in his Parsifal, is dreaming of 
an innocent fool who shall heal the diseases and foulnesses of 
the world; in his Lohengrin, of a spotless yet ignorant knight 
who shall overcome; in his Siegfried, of an untutored, run-wild 



144 "THE LIFE INDEED 

product of nature, who shall somehow, in the twilight of the 
heathen gods, open the new radiance of Christianity. But 
none of them strike into the ongoings of the world as a force 
and power there; they do not create but only suffer and 
achieve; and they all leave the intractable world at last, by 
death, or treachery, or translation, — leave it with only the 
memory of a vision. Our Lord opens the simpler way, the 
way not for the exceptional knight or giant or fool, but for 
every common man and every prosaic life. Receive the king- 
dom of heaven as a little child; dare in the perfect courage of 
the childlike heart to love and trust, to lay aside fear 
and fighting and the strain and strenuousness of puzzled study, 
and the door of the kingdom of heaven lies wide open. How 
many are ready, even in this age of the world, to commit them- 
selves to this simple ideal of love, accepting it without reserva- 
tions and safeguardings on this side and that, and to ensue the 
consequences? 

One difficulty is, and has been, that men, though looking 
out into the universe and seeing love and mercy there, have 
been too ready to treat that love as working only in one direc- 
tion ; only in the direction from heaven to earth. As the long- 
suffering love of God became more evident to them, they have 
hastened to accept it and make it available for their purposes, 
without adequate committal to the human return it should en- 
gender. The power that evolves the universe is a spirit that 
loves and forgives; what then shall the recipient of such favor 
do about it? Receive it and make use of it, of course; but too 
many have stopped there, and just have banked on it, as one 
more instrument for furthering their own alien ends. Like 
Heine's blasphemous wit on his death-bed, after a consciously 
misspent life, their lives have too often and too affrontingly 
said, ''God will forgive, c'est son metier y it is His trade." And 
so that love of God has been allowed to minister to their greed 
and their lazy transgression; they have lived their old selfish 
life and banked on getting forgiveness at the end. This is not 
childlikeness ; it is mere perverse childishness. But you must 
note this: that this revelation of mercy and allowance, is just 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 145 

the polar opposite of self-seeking or even of justice: it pro- 
claims the spirit of God as a spirit of free grace, as love un- 
bought, undeserved, pouring itself forth on the world out of 
its own infinite fulness. That is the only true interpretation 
of love; all that stops short of this contains still some tinge of 
barter, of reward, of commercialism. And that is the interpre- 
tation which has been coming slowly, — how slowly, and with 
what difficulty, — into the free ideals of manhood. It is the 
outward current, the free unrestrained overflow and surplus- 
age, which because it is felt in the universe, is by that fact 
recognized as the real ideal of manhood and life. If the spirit 
bearing witness with ours is the spirit of God, how can our 
spirit find true communion otherwise than as a spirit of grace, 
daring to love not because our neighbor is lovable and deserv- 
ing, not even because thereby we would secure his answering 
love and so conserve our greater dignity and safety, but be- 
cause our spirit of love flows in the same majestic direction as 
the mystic spirit that witnesses with it. Love unprovoked, 
without reference to payment or consequences; such is the 
ideal of life that is struggling to the birth. When we see its 
height and depth as it is, how can we regard it otherwise than 
as a transcendent element of life, a miracle, if you please, from 
the unseen places, far beyond the scope of what may be com- 
manded, far outrunning the empire of law. Yet with the ful- 
ness of time the ideal has come; a veritable law of the spirit 
of life; we cannot deny it, we cannot attain rest until it is in 
us. You remember how absolutely, how uncompromisingly, 
St. Paul has set it forth, by drawing out a kind of scale of 
values, measuring it by the response that different shades of 
life elicit. 'Tor scarcely for a righteous man," he says, '%ill 
one die, yet peradventure for a good man some would even 
dare to die." The human response may be put forth haltingly 
and sporadically when some worthy man comes who deserves 
it, some man whose disinterested love elicits an answer after 
its own kind. "But," the ideal goes relentlessly on to say, 
"God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were 
yet sinners, Christ dies for us." And who is Christ? Is he 



146 THE LIFE INDEED 

not bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh ; is He not, in truth, 
the coming Man, whom law has struggled to create, and proph- 
ecy has worked into progressive vision? Is not this the per- 
fect, ultimate expression of that liberation of the spirit to 
excess, that surplusage and overflow of love, which stops not 
at desert or answering worthiness in the object, but is the copy 
of the spirit of God? And if one died for all, then were all 
dead. There, my friends, whether you take it or leave it, there 
is the ultimate ideal of manhood's capabilities. 

''It is high, I cannot attain unto it," is doubtless the answer 
that springs into your heart here. Yes, it is high, as heaven 
is above earth; yet the holiest manhood is committed to it; 
we are bound that way; we remain in deadlock, surrounded 
by the broken implements of our toil, without it. And what 
less can we augur of an evolution that begins with the brooding 
spirit of God, warming into life the timid and halting, yet 
ever more confident, reactions of the human spirit? Why, 
here is the point where the spirit of man, stronger at last than 
death, steps forth free, adult, master of its impulses and ac- 
tions. Men have tried, as we saw at the beginning of our 
study, to peer curiously into that spirit's destiny, by interro- 
gating the occult, by exploring the dim tracts of psychism and 
hypnotism and mediumship and dreams; but all they could 
discover was a mysterious underworld of subliminal conscious- 
ness, out of which came here and there a fitful flash of some 
strange unclassified power, they knew not what. Was it not 
their mistake that they were looking toward the underworld, 
down toward the instinctive rudiments of being, where men 
are still the puppets of arbitrary nature? No, not downward 
is the direction, but inward, inward, inward, to the central 
point where, in the dawning of light, the spirit of man and the 
spirit of God are beginning their communion together, in a 
mystic common witness of which nothing but the final seeing 
eye to eye in love, and the final cooperation in the work of a 
kingdom, can be the key. I believe it is so. The central rudi- 
mental instinct is the instinct of the spirit; and the only 
worthy definition and dignity of that we find in the creative 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 147 

spirit of God. The revelations of our subconscious self are all 
well enough; we do not reject them; but let us be sure they 
are grounded in a centre worthy of our highest nature, worthy 
not only of what we are but of what our hearts beat on to be. 
Thus it is, if ever, that the unfolding of the life beyond can 
become clear, and authentic, and pure. 

But transcendent as all this is, it begins, it pursues its whole 
course, in the most universal relations of life. What other 
thing is there that fills the world so full, after all, as love? 
Viewed in this supreme manifestation it seems, and is, a trans- 
cendental thing, so high that we faint in the contemplation of 
it. But does not a new world open, and a new impulse of labor 
and sacrifice, to every young man and every young woman, 
that have found, out of all the world, the heart to which his 
or her affections may be married? How God is revealing love 
all the while in the family, in the friend, in the neighbor; 
how it expands in wisdom and strength from the neighbor — 
the boor that is nigh — the tiller of the soil and working man 
whose activities lie next to ours — onward to the community, 
and the clan, and the nation, and the race; yes, onward, in a 
divine momentum, to humanity and the world that God has 
made. Why, this love that I have been describing is just the 
final opening of the gates, so that what began with lover and 
lass, father and son, brother and sister, still narrow and rudi- 
mental in all, though genuine, in all, is an unchecked fountain 
for all the world, flowing at last free and full, and consciously 
identified with the spirit of the universe. The race of man is 
some day not only to accept and acknowledge, but in very 
truth to be the Christ, the Messiah of its promise. This is 
what the law of the spirit of life, which so long has surged up 
to light and energy, finally amounts to; the far destiny of its 
evolutionary uprise lies involved in it. 

Our subject has now become so broad, and the radiations 
of this outward current are so many, that I must needs exer- 
cise care here to keep rigorously to the main channel, lest we 
lose ourselves in complexities. You may know then, if ques- 
tions rise, that I am postponing many things here calling im- 



148 THE LIFE INDEED 

portunately for remark; postponing them in order first of all 
to get the one dominating line; and indeed there is coming a 
more fitting place for the various applications to life. Mean- 
while, it is important to note that here we have reached the 
outer bounds of the world; in other words, the love by which 
at the fulness of the time manhood becomes vitalized is a love 
universal. It spreads upwards, downwards, everywhere; free 
and pervasive as the air; its only sufficing pattern the love of 
God. You can see what a marvelous chain of sequences lead 
to this; can see it in the simple terms of his growing insight. 
There has risen in humanity an ideal that at some stage of 
being every man, his individuality complete and accountable, 
may do what seems good to him; but to this end he must at- 
tain to a table-land whereon the good that seems shall be real 
and absolute, whereon he shall see things as they are. Now 
in order to see things as they are, he must love them; there is 
no other way to enter into their life, with its motions to good, 
its tendencies to evil. Without that penetrative, allowance- 
making love, he stays outside. But further, I am speaking of 
a communion which can only be with beings like-minded, a 
communion wherein both parties can enter on equal terms; 
and man's equal party, his likeness and image, is just his 
fellow-man. If he has idealized him to the Son of man, still 
He is the brother-man, wiser and holier, and so Lord of man's 
will. There is the object of his regard. In order to see the 
good in his fellow-man he must love his fellow-man; to see it 
in the ongoings of the world, he must love the mankind that 
makes up the world; to see it in God, still his way is to love 
his brother-man, for as St. John says, ''He that loveth not his 
brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God, whom he 
hath not seen?" There is a bit of common sense for you. St. 
John, with all his mysticism, will not have a soul straining it- 
self to get the rapturous emotional attitude toward God, when 
all the while his heart is hard toward any brother-man. A 
man that does that, he says, and professes thus to love God, 
is a liar. All this reduces, you see, to a free play of love 
through all the manhood being; it has the pulsation of uni- 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 149 

versality; a man has reached the plane where he loves his kind 
not because his kind is lovely, or because his love would wait 
for and depend on any evoking occasion, but just because it 
is in him to love. Therefore it is a love not for those alone 
who are bound by ties of blood, for wife, family, comrade, clan, 
race, though all this has had its broadening and beneficent 
part in his evolution; it is a love also for enemies and perse- 
cutors, and for all who are in need or darkness, whether here 
or across the seas. ''Who is my mother? and who are my 
brethren?" you remember our Lord once asked. ''And he 
stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said. Be- 
hold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do 
the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is 
my brother, and sister, and mother." Some scoffers have 
treated this remark as if it betrayed a strain of heartlessness 
in Jesus, and especially when He startled men by a half-truth 
utterance of the same principle, saying that whoever would 
come after Him must hate his father and mother and relatives 
and forsake all he had. Why, it was just the utterance of a 
heart as big as the world. His translation of love from the 
terms of the family and the parish, from a narrow and blood- 
bound thing, to the free course of the love of God, love uni- 
versal. A simple thing, after all, though so large; it is the 
emancipate spirit of life, which we may express in the words 
in which Lowell described the character of Abraham Lincoln: 

Fruitful and friendly for all human kind, 

Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars. 

I confess there is no other revelation of Scripture which so fills 
me with amazement, is so manifestly of another world, as this. 
It almost takes one's breath away to reflect how fearlessly and 
absolutely this intrinsic love in man, and for man, is identified 
with the far- withdrawn life of God. "God is love," says St. 
John, "and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God 
in him." There you have it; no theologian in the world, spec- 
ulating on essences and attributes, on omniscience and omni- 
presence and omnipotence and omni-what you please, would 



I50 THE LIFE INDEED 

dare say that of his own motion; it is too sublimely simple. 
The divine is so revealed in that supreme human trait, the per- 
fected capability of loving without bounds, that what can be 
predicated of the one is unconditionally predicated of the 
other. 

Here is the essential note of contrast between the old and 
the new. Under an empire of law the soul looks up from the 
under side of things to a Power and Wisdom enthroned above 
it, and stretching out so vastly beyond man's power and wis- 
dom that he cannot emulate them. He can do a little to dis- 
cover and use them; he can to a limited extent deflect the 
forces of the universe, physical and moral, to his own purpose; 
but for the most part his role is one of simple submission to 
the inevitable, and of endeavor to make the best of it. If he is 
a slave, he looks up to the cosmic burden above him and groans 
under its weight. If he is an athlete, who accepts and master- 
fully wields his law of being, he still looks up thankfully to 
the Source of law, but he is apt also, unless a finer spirit im- 
bues him, to look down on his weaker fellow and despise him; 
is proud, like the Pharisee, because he can work his law better 
than can his neighbor the publican. In the empire of grace 
and truth, the dominance of the outward current, all this is 
changed. It is no more looking upward, to a remote and alien 
Will which must be obeyed, nor looking down from a superior 
height on those whose works are less meritorious than ours. 
Here, you see, comes in St. Paul's distinction about the grounds 
of salvation: ''not of works, lest any man should boast." No: 
it is just looking straight out into a brother's eyes, and making 
acquaintance with his soul, and sharing his human burden and 
lot. It is looking straight out, too, fearless and trustful, into 
a universe vitalized by such love. Then comes the amazing 
consciousness that in this attitude of love he is sharing, on 
equal and filial terms, in the central life of God; such love 
being the motion and spirit that rolls through all things. On 
this ground, as not on the ground of power and wisdom, he 
can actually emulate God. There is no more near and far, no 
more sense that the universe is an undiscovered and inacces- 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 151 

sible realm beyond him, though in power and wisdom he still 
must keep to his insignificant place; here, in a love which is 
fruitful and friendly for all, he is dwelling, as at home, in the 
secret place of the Most High. His very humility but accen- 
tuates his essential likeness to God; it is ''that stoop of the 
soul which in bending upraises it too." This idea, you re- 
member, is Browning's favorite theme; he has laid out tre- 
mendous poetic effort on the expression of it. In his poem of 
Saul it reaches its most glowing height; where David, after 
having measured himself, in sense of utter insignificance, 
against the power and wisdom of the universe, goes on to say: 

Yet with all this abounding experience, this deity known, 

I shall dare to discover some province, some gift of my own. 

There's a faculty pleasant to exercise, hard to hoodwink, 

I am fain to keep still in abeyance, (I laugh as I think) 

Lest, insisting to claim and parade in it, wot ye, I worst 

E'en the Giver in one gift. — Behold, I could love if I durst! 

But I sink the pretension as fearing a man may o'ertake 

God's own speed in the one way of love: I abstain for love's sake. 

Thus the power to love rises in man's heart as a discovery, 
just as we have seen it rising; as a discovery of that in which 
man can emulate God. Of course he does not gloat over his 
new discovery long. It raises the question whether, after all, 
he is so far beyond the Father of his spirit: 

Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift. 

That I doubt his own love can compete with it? Here, the parts shift? 

Here, the creature surpass the Creator, — the end, what Began ? 

Would I suffer for him that I love ? So wouldst thou — so wilt thou ! 
So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown — 
And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up or down 
One spot for the creature to stand in! 

So his discovery of love, with the deduction from it, becomes 
his discovery of Christ, who after all is his own nature, per-, 
feet and ideal. 

This is the summit of manhood, as it comes to measure its 
potencies and use its free spirit of life. As thus in free play 
these potencies are too great for an earth-trained human na- 



152 THE LIFE INDEED 

ture; but in fact life is not free from its fetters until it has 
reached this summit. Every point short of this, as soon as 
we put the check there, leaves life, in one way or another, as 
much in bondage as ever. Over against each halting-place of 
love rises a converse of hate or armed neutrality; suspicion 
and distrust, or jealousy and contempt, dark evil glances over 
the barrier; while the love that is prisoned inside is no more 
than a spiritual compact of offense and defense. So instead 
of making this marvelous pulsation of love a hallowing power 
to make us love all men better for loving one, every bound set 
makes an occasion to hate or ignore all outside the circle. This 
is not grace at all, but only a refined kind of business partner- 
ship. Take as illustration the Jews, whose tremendous dis- 
tinction it is to have been the national vehicle whereby this 
salvation by grace was revealed. Their law had not dried up 
or made less intense their capacity of love; they had merely 
made it too exclusive. I have remarked that their great error 
was to have stopped at the race, to have magnified the law of 
the species to that point and then committed themselves to an 
arrested development. They could not get over the stumbling- 
block of Christ crucified, could not accept the ultimate conse- 
quences of a free play of universal grace. Yet within their 
bounds their love of race, intense and pure, furnishes almost 
the ideal pattern of love. Its error is just in its self-imposed 
barrier, which will not let the passion burst bonds and flow out 
to all the earth. And so just at that barrier-point cluster evils 
and hatreds as intense as is the love itself; and these bring on 
that race the answering hatred and distrust of the world. Like 
begets like. Here is how Charles Kingsley makes a Jew de- 
scribe his race as it was in the fifth Christian century. "Alas, 
my lord," says a certain Jew secretary to the prefect, "you do 
not know the customs of that accursed folk. They have a 
damnable practice of treating every member of their nation 
as a brother, and helping each freely and faithfully without 
reward; whereby they are enabled to plunder all the rest of 
the world, and thrive themselves from the least to the greatest." 
Whether that is a fair description of the nation to-day I leave 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 153 

you to judge. But that is another story. The Jewish spirit, 
as such, with its undeniably noble traits, may not be aware 
what ails it; but some day, St. Paul says, the veil will be taken 
from their hearts. Well, if it is, look out for the avalanche 
of human love which will mark their mission. Nor have we, 
as a so-called Christian nation, any great cause to boast. Pa- 
triotism, love of country, is a noble thing; but set the limit of 
love there and the nation is still capable of rejoicing, as it did 
a few years ago, over the success of a tariff which takes the 
bread out of another nation's mouth. I need not extend the 
illustration to the prodigious navies and armaments, as well 
as the finely exacting treaties, which one and all are the huge 
symbol of national distrust and fear; I need not speak of the 
churchly love which splits a doctrine between north and north- 
east side to make a fence round it, and has only odium theo- 
logicum for the outsiders; nor of the rancors and jealousies of 
private life, which are so often merely the reverse side of a 
too narrow, too restricted love. No: I give you the exact and 
rigorous truth : you stay the course and radiation of love at any 
point short of a whole humanity, and at that point it is not 
love at all; it is still in the shackles of an old bondage and an 
old fear. 

What then do I owe to my fellow-man? A fair question 
this, echo though it be of the old Cain question, '^Am I my 
brother's keeper?" What we owe to men, to life, to the world, 
is just our duty, what is due. The law has taught us that. 
And St. Paul, speaking for the adult man, and making the 
height of our duty correspond to the grade of our evolution, 
puts the whole matter into one short utterance: "Owe no man 
anything, but to love one another." That is the whole extent 
of our debt; that is to say, we owe to mankind simply all that 
we are. It is the tremendous crowning-point of evolution, as 
moulded by the free spirit, that man has it in him to do that. 
Love does not let us off easily; but we cannot remonstrate; it 
is love's own chosen way, its only blessedness lies in that peren- 
nial obligation. 



1 54 THE LIFE INDEED 

III. THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN 

But a new element rises to view here. A debt so imperative, 
a self-sacrifice so absolute, a freedom so bound, — who shall 
lay it upon us as a duty? Through all those centuries of edu- 
cation in godlikeness men have learned to receive mercy and 
forgiveness, and the consciousness of that grace from the un- 
seen places has made two results possible : either to make that 
immunity an occasion for carelessness, not to say transgres- 
sion, or to make the law itself all the more holy and just and 
good. So it is that every advance in insight has its obverse and 
reverse sides, according as it is or is not accepted in the spirit 
of it. But when it comes to showing that same mercy and for- 
giveness, and embodying it in loving character, and when this 
is put before man as a debt that he owes, as a thing that as 
true man he must do, immediately Shylock's question rises to 
rebel, — 

On what compulsion must I? tell me that. 

And the same answer meets it: 

The quality of mercy is not strain 'd; 
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven 
Upon the place beneath it: it is twice blest; 
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes. 

But to secure the blessing of him that gives; in other words, 
to commit ourselves freely and without reservation to this new 
law of the spirit of life; this is the new problem that rises to 
view here, the last and crucial barrier to surmount. For we 
have reached the point where we can see over into the new life, 
can see its glory and its beauty; and we are aware that we have 
been lifelong recipients of just such grace and forgiveness; but 
to launch forth on it, as on a returnless ocean, and to make 
it the rule of living, — who is sufficient for that? Until there 
is actual committal of the will to it, the heart of man is still 
merely looking through the gates of his prison, merely con- 
templating the sunshine beyond. The untasted cup is at his 
lips. 

He saith, "It is good"; still he drinks not: he lets me praise life, 
Gives assent, yet would die for his own part. 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 155 

And so, high as we have come, dazzled as we are with the glory 
of it, still we must ask, as Browning asked of Saul, — 

What was gone, what remained? All to traverse, 'twixt hope and despair; 
Death was past, life not come. 

This committal to the new spirit of life, here so absolute a 
requisite, is what we call faith ; and this faith, in its essence, is 
the evidence, or as some translate it, the testing, of things not 
seen. It is, in the evolutionary dialect we have chosen, that 
supreme effort of the spirit of man by which he enters the 
majestic outward current of the universe, so as thenceforth 
to be consciously and willingly identified with it. Whether 
God or he has more part is an idle question; our concern is 
with the committal which constitutes his part. Until this is 
made, the whole new life remains merely a proffer, not a gift; 
and so a thing not understood at all, for it cannot be under- 
stood except by living it. This, you see, is only another way 
of saying, "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the 
kingdom of God." Faith is the human initiative, as it makes 
the vital venture and enters the kingdom. 

A man cannot make this committal by being told to make 
it. It is wholly beyond any law that can be laid upon him, 
anything that can be commanded. It must be a free motion 
on his own part, his own surrender, his own will. And yet, 
we do not know how, a strange other half comes to meet his 
act, and as soon as it comes he feels, he knows, that that other 
and unseen half is really the vital whole, and his half is 
nothing. Have you ever waked up in the night unable to 
stir, — as if somehow the wheels of your being were caught 
at a dead centre; — unable to make the slightest movement 
hand or foot, unable to cry out for help, every function but 
breathing at a dead syncope? You know how awful is the 
sense of this stoppage of the vital motions, though it be en- 
tirely without pain. And yet, the instant you succeed in 
making the smallest movement, hardly a movement at all, 
everything is right again, the currents of life resume their 
normal flow. Well^ it has always seemed to me as if, on its 



156 THE LIFE INDEED 

larger scale, the personal venture of faith were liKe that. One 
moment the being, though all ready to live, is at a deadlock 
and standstill; the next moment it is launched in the free cur- 
rent of the new life, with functions in full play, as if it were 
born so. It is like that man to whom our Lord said, "Stretch 
forth thy hand." What a command this, to one whose arm 
had been withered and inert for years, perhaps from birth, an 
atrophied member. And yet — somehow the effort was made, 
and the ruddy current of life came coursing down, and the 
man was made whole. It was, so far forth, the birth of a spirit, 
a will, and new vitality was the answer to it. 

How much this committal of faith means, morally and prac- 
tically, we can realize better by comparing its bold reckless- 
ness, as a virtue, with the self-contained and thrifty virtues of 
paganism and legalism. You remember I quoted from Ches- 
terton the remark that Christianity had adopted the old pagan 
virtues, like justice and temperance, but had invented three 
wholly new ones, faith, hope, and charity, the so-called vir- 
tues of grace. He goes on then to contrast these new virtues 
with the old. Not stopping here to dwell on his first element 
of contrast, namely that, while the old are the sad virtues, 
these new are ''the gay and exuberant virtues," we note that 
"the second evident fact, which is even more evident, is the 
fact that the pagan virtues are the reasonable virtues, and 
that the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity are in 
their essence as unreasonable as they can be." His exposition 
of this remark, though it strains the paradox a little, will bear 
thought. He shows first how eminently reasonable and self- 
justifying the pagan virtues are. "Justice," he says, "consists 
in finding out a certain thing due to a certain man and giving 
it to him. Temperance consists in finding out the proper limit 
of a particular indulgence and adhering to that. But," he 
goes on to say, "charity means pardoning what is unpardon- 
able, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things 
are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believ- 
ing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all." This is his violent 
way of saying, what is essentially true, that these new virtues, 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 157 

reversing the whole current of character from inward-flowing 
to outward, are just as unreasonable as they can be, and do 
their work of regenerating the decrepit old world by their very 
unreasonableness. 

Before we go on to complete the application of this to our 
subject, it is worth while to quote Mr. Chesterton a little 
further, as especially relating to the greatest of these, charity, 
or love. "It is true," he says, "that there is a thing crudely 
called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; 
but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. 
It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does 
not exist at all, or exists wholly for them." Then later he 
sums up the general atmosphere, so to say, of the world pagan 
and the world Christian. "The beautiful and astonishing 
pagan world," he says, "... was a world in which common 
sense was really common;" while of the virtues which irradiate 
a Christian world he says: "They are all three paradoxical, 
they are all three practical, and they are all three paradoxical 
because they are practical. It is the stress of ultimate need, 
and a terrible knowledge of things as they are, which led men 
to set up these riddles, and to die for them. Whatever may be 
the meaning of the contradiction, it is the fact that the only 
kind of hope that is of any use in a battle is a hope that denies 
arithmetic. Whatever may be the meaning of the contradic- 
tion, it is the fact that the only kind of charity which any 
weak spirit wants, or which any generous spirit feels, is the 
charity which forgives the sins that are like scarlet. ^ Whatever 
may be the meaning of faith, it must always mean a certainty 
about something we cannot prove. Thus, for instance, we be- 
lieve by faith in the existence of other people." 

This last sentence is not so much of an anticlimax as it 
sounds. To have faith in the existence of other people, with 
all their individual worlds of hopes and fears, handicaps and 
errors, is really the final application of faith to practice. Let 
us leave the ordinary notion of faith, that it is assent to a 
creed; it may include that, but it is a great deal more, and 
its central essence is something quite other. To say that by 



158 THE LIFE INDEED 

faith you commit your whole being to an ideal is to say that 
you live as if a certain thing were true, conforming all your 
acts to that idea, and yet the thing to which you thus relate 
yourself does not yet exist, or if it does you cannot prove it, 
do not try to prove it; rather your faith virtually creates it, 
as an object to live for. Your faith is thus a kind of excess, 
an exuberance of being; you take that attitude when there is 
no reason in things or in men for you to act so; nay, the atti- 
tude may be absurd or dangerous from a reasonable point of 
view; and yet you act so because it is in you to act so, it is the 
spirit, the initiative, of your being so to do. This, you see, is 
just that overflow or surplusage of life that we have spoken of. 
It is the vitality that comes into a man when his ideal of things 
has laid hold of his will; Professor James speaks of it 
as "the will to believe"; though it is not so much the will 
to have faith as it is the will which is itself faith at work. It 
is something like the youthful spirit of adventure for the ad- 
venture's sake; only, with all the abandon of that, it sees an 
unseeable good beyond the adventure. It is like — nay it is, 
the leap from realism, which sees only a sordid and crooked 
and toil-enslaved world such as Koheleth and the realists in 
general see, to idealism, to romance if you please, which 
creates a world more delightful, more righteous, more coura- 
geous, more capable of love, than actually exists, and which 
then casts the whole weight of its being into that scale. You 
can think how much this means. Why, it is as much as life 
is worth to have such faith as this. And it is large, it makes 
us large, just according to our ideal of the sum of things, ac- 
cording to the mighty horizon in whose bounds we move. 

Now the reason why we cannot let faith stop with mere 
assent to a creed is because it is not mere passive surrender 
alone; it is an act, or rather a habitude of action; the very 
highest act of the spirit of man, its act when the spirit of God 
bears witness with it; it is in fact this life indeed in action. 
We speak of things at rest and things in motion; we contem- 
plate them, as the phrase is, both statically and dynamically. 
Well, we have seen the statics of the new life: love to fellow- 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 159 

man, taking its pattern from the pervasive love of God. Here 
in faith we have the dynamics of it: that same love tingling 
and quivering with energy, committing itself to a work in the 
world, to a creative contact with man as man, and daring to 
ensue the consequences. That is, it is faith in human nature; 
it is freely venturing to commit itself to human nature as it 
is, in that overflow of self-forgetting love; or as St. Paul says, 
it '^beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, 
endureth all things." This, not because all things are there 
to believe in, — or rather to know, because if they were there 
you would know it, and not have to believe it at all, — but 
precisely because they are not there, and the faith would create 
them there. And this faith in human nature, as the mighty 
power of Christian love is with us to testify, is the greatest 
creative agency in the world. Without it, to call men out of 
their prison of worldliness, and out of the baseness in which 
they wallow, where would mankind be? Why, this faith in 
human nature, which brings love to men and gives them a 
chance to rise, is just what we have laughed at as an absurd 
and unreal thing, and the crude view of which has split de- 
nominations asunder, — what we call imputed righteousness. 
Imputed righteousness is just giving man a chance; the same 
as you give a drunkard who desires to reform all the help and 
encouragement in the world until he has reformed in actual 
fact. When he signs the pledge he is not a temperate man; 
he is the same old sot, with his raging appetite still pulling at 
his vitals; but you treat him as if he were a temperate man, 
you open to him all the freedom and privileges of the world 
of temperance into which you are introducing him ; you accord 
him these though you know he will stumble and fall ; you would 
be heartless and inhuman not to do so. Well, what is that? 
Imputed temperance, nothing less, nothing else. You impute 
to him the virtue that is possible, until he has made it real. 
Just so it is with all the virtues, all the potencies, of humanity. 
By your faith in human nature you treat them as if they were 
righteous when they are not righteous; you love them into 
righteousness; you give them by imputation all the benefits 



i6o THE LIFE INDEED 

of the completed virtue, until they have made the imputed 
virtue real. What else can you do, if you love men at all? 

But you say faith is faith in God; you are afraid I will 
leave out the divine element. Don't be afraid; the divine ele- 
ment is all the while working with the human; it is the divine 
indeed that from its unseen depth is all the while taking the 
initiative. Your faith in human nature is faith in the God on 
whom human nature is to lay hold for salvation, just as you 
have already laid hold of that spirit which is in you to will 
and to do; your own faith is the laying hold of that unseen 
power, and by it you are new-born into that kingdom where 
He works and reigns. Not to have faith in Him is not to be- 
lieve, not to take for granted, that He can manage the world 
that He is evolving and bring it to its goal. Faith in God? 
Why, God's court, God's believed nature, is just the clearing- 
house of all our ideas of effective work in the world. That 
nature of God, walked in as if known, lived in as the only solu- 
tion of life, is our constant base of supplies. Here is where, by 
contrast, the deadly blight of agnosticism appears. To live 
as if the source and impulse of your evolution could not be 
known is to cling to the bondage, the inertia, the paganism, 
the death, of realism; you are condemned thereby to treat the 
world as it is, and to get out all your ideals by experiment, by 
the rule of thumb, having no clearing-house of love and high 
standards to measure by. Think how much more it means 
when, having by the sublime uprise of faith risen out of ag- 
nosticism, you hold it true, and live as if it were true, that 
God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and 
God in him. Now you have the principle by which to make 
your ideal no more a rule of thumb, a thing groped after and 
always doubted, but real and feasible, and known by its 
mighty works. 

But your faith in God, your primal reference, so to say, to 
your clearing-house of ideal, translates itself in its final appli- 
cation to faith in your brother-man. It becomes a kind of 
spirit of adventure in which you go forth to make man from 
what he is to what he ought to be. In so doing you must 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE i6i 

reckon with all his untowardness, all his baseness, all his depths 
of degradation; and your knowledge or agnosticism is not 
sufficient to this; it must be a reckless launching forth on the 
shoreless ocean of faith, must be an overflow of your own life 
beyond reasonable bounds. As Chesterton says, it is, in its 
very essence, just as unreasonable as it can be. But it, and 
it alone, has that other mark of full life that he mentioned: 
it is full of joy, abandon, gaiety, exuberance. As a virtue of 
grace it contrasts itself with the sad virtues of paganism, or 
the painful obedience of that empire of law wherein, as St.. 
Paul says, men were ''shut up unto the faith which should 
afterwards be revealed." Joy is the note of the full tide of 
being, wherein all the functions of life are in free play, making 
music together. What a misapprehension it is under which 
men labor, that the Christian life of love is a solemn, sancti- 
monious, morose, despairing thing! Do you know that even 
so great a man as Edmund Clarence Stedman has so mistaken 
the reality of things as to say that that picture of Diirer's, his 
"Melancholia," represents the Genius of Christianity! Why, 
this full tide of faith, wreaking its energies on the needs of 
the world, is the joyfulest thing, the sanest, most enthusiastic 
thing in the world. Stedman wrote while our age was still 
under the morbid influence of a half -faith; you recall the 
period well; when, with Tennyson and Matthew Arnold and 
their school, men were trying to have faith in God, and moon- 
ing and mourning over the seeming malignities that they found 
in Nature. It was a kind of dead-lift of faith, trying to pull 
itself up by the boot-straps, and it found expression, or tried 
to, in the contemplation of those sad seers 

Who trusted God was love indeed 

And love Creation's final law — 

Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw 
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed. 

That was only a half- faith, — afraid God wouldn't, or couldn't, 
do his part; it assumed that if only God would manage things 
right, humanity could do the rest. But the real progress of 
things is to get out of this half-faith; to trust in your clearing- 



1 62 THE LIFE INDEED 

house, your base of supplies, taking for granted that God has 
as large an ideal at heart as we have, — and then live up to 
it. The only way to hve up to it is to be yourself love indeed, 
and then you are contributing your part to make love cre- 
ation's final law- And just as soon as you do that, applying 
that love in the freedom of the spirit to your neighbor at your 
side, your doubt and sadness melt into an exuberant, adven- 
turous joy. Your life becomes genial, rays out to meet and 
illumine all other life. You don't have to strain and struggle 
to live, or figure on how to get up the proper emotional state 
for happiness, you live by radiating life. Chesterton describes 
one of the well-known men of this age in these words: "He 
was one of those people who live up to their emotional incomes, 
who are always taut and tingling with vanity. Hence he had 
no strength to spare; hence he had no kindness, no geniality; 
for geniality is almost definable as strength to spare. He had 
no god-like carelessness; he never forgot himself; his whole 
life was, to use his own expression, an arrangement. He went 
in for 'the art of living' — a miserable trick." Geniahty — 
strength to spare — the god-like carelessness which forgets 
self — these are marks of that adventurous life which has 
committed itself to faith in human nature. And its alternative 
is, either vanity, all shut up in the contemplation of one's own 
cleverness and cultivating the art of living, or else the morbid 
inertia of that half-faith which cannot take God's gracious 
love as a thing to be known, and exulted in, and poured out in 
good deeds on the world. 

Such faith in human nature is no weakling virtue. I am 
not prophesying to you smooth things, or idle emotions of 
sweet belief; am not opening the vision of a life that drifts 
lazily down the stream of years with no hand on oar or rudder. 
No: with all its strain of purest joy, the only true joy of living, 
such life of faith, which can love enemies and suffer injustice 
and dare to turn the other cheek, connotes the highest courage. 
It requires pluck, stamina, to love your fellow-man through 
thick and thin, to keep that love in you burning brightly and 
without flicker of inconsistency or abatement; it is as much 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 163 

as life is worth. ^'God hath not given us/' as St. Paul says, 
''the spirit of cowardice, but of power, and of love, and of 
sanity — a sound mind." 

We need to keep constantly in mind our base of operations, 
and so I must have you note again that this Hfe I am portray- 
ing — this life of universal love, universal faith, universal hope 
— is life on the larger scale, on a scale as large as the largest 
it can ever be in us to be. It is just the life of the spirit, of 
the outward current, wherein we magnificently dare to take 
the initiative and wreak ourselves "soul-forward, headlong" 
on the world as we see it, or rather as we see what is ideally in 
our manhood. But this larger scale magnifies everything in 
proportion, and the depths that are possible are correspond- 
ingly just as great as are the possible heights. We have be- 
come, so to say, original; and both original sin and original 
righteousness partake in this enlargement of relation. I am 
using the word original, you see, not in its mystic theological 
sense but in the sense which we give it in everyday parlance. 
We have reached the point where it is our adult function to 
have about us something individual and original; not neces- 
sarily that we do differently from everybody else, but that we 
do it of our own motion. So far forth, as St. Paul says, we 
are dead to law, that is, to doing things merely because some 
external will has imposed it upon us. And so our original sin, 
if we are foolish enough to incur it, is really originative; not 
a fated thing to which we are born, whether we will it or not, 
nor a blind stupid pitfall into which we tumble heels over 
head, and then either curse or pity ourselves because we find 
ourselves caught, but what is called a ''sin against light," a 
sin in which we know what we are about, and deliberately 
choose it, and in which our new-born power and love and sound 
mind are all outraged. In like manner our righteousness has 
become individual and originative, artistic so to say; it takes 
the color and thrust of our personality; not a thing which the 
givers of the law, or the officers of the church, wound up and 
set going, to run thenceforth of itself, but a thing again in 
which our new-born power and love and sound mind have free 



i64 THE LIFE INDEED 

and fearless course. There is the note of originality about 
them both; and this is what makes them great and manlike. 
The adult man ought to count it shame to be like a jelly-fish, 
which environment and heredity can mux all up and tread into 
shapelessness, or a chameleon, which takes any color that will 
keep it out of danger; he belongs to the higher species which 
has a backbone and an emancipated will, and which to any 
alien action against it can oppose the overcoming reaction of 
individual judgment and wisdom. 

You remember how Kipling has set forth this need of origi- 
nality in life, by contrast, in his striking poem entitled ''Tom- 
linson.'^ He has done it so brutally as to make it sound coarse, 
but this is merely his way of hitting the nail on the head with 
such a resounding blow that the reader's attention must re- 
spond; and we can take whatever truth it has without the bru- 
tality. Tomlinson of Berkeley Square, you know, gave up 
the ghost and went to his eternal account. He had always 
lived a conventional parasitic sort of life, depending on others 
and taking the passive color of circumstances; but now he 
found that in order to balance his books he must answer some 
searching questions. 

"Stand up, stand up now, Tomlinson, and answer loud and high 
The good that ye did for the sake of men or ever ye came to die — 
The good that ye did for the sake of men in little earth so lone!" 

At which his naked soul grew white with terror: 

"O I have a friend on earth," he said, "that was my priest and guide, 
And well would he answer all for me if he were by my side." 

But to this he only got the response that Ezekiel long ago an- 
ticipated, that this was not a partnership but an individual 
matter, — 

"For the race is run by one and one and never by two and two." 

Then he could only look vainly up and down, and falter out: 

"O this I have read in a book," he said, "and that was told to me. 

And this I have thought that another man thought of a Prince in Muscovy." 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 165 

But this would not go either, and as inexorable destiny gripped 
him closer, he could look back and forth and whimper, 

"O this I have felt, and this I have guessed, and this I have heard men say, 
And this they wrote that another man wrote of a carl in Norroway." 

But the stern answer to all this paltering was, 

"O none may reach by hired speech of neighbour, priest, and kin 
Through borrowed deed to God's good meed that lies so fair within; 
Get hence, get hence to the Lord of Wrong, for doom has yet to run, 
And ... the faith that ye share with Berkeley Square uphold you, 
Tomlinson!" 

Then they took him to the other place, where sat as stoker 
and judge the Satan who, whatever his abysmal evils, had from 
the first character enough to have striven with God and taken 
the consequences; and here the other side of the account was 
opened. 

"Sit down, sit down upon the slag, and answer loud and high 
The harm that ye did to the Sons of Men or ever you came to die." 

Yes, he could think of a foul fleshly wrong he had done; but, 
falling back on Adam's excuse, he said it was not he, it was 
the woman who tempted him; and to this came the same ob- 
jection as to his borrowed good deed: 

"For the race is run by one and one and never by two and two." 

Then, as he went on to rake up what he had heard, and what 
was noised abroad, and what he had got out of French books, 
only to be met by the peremptory demand, 

"Have ye sinned one sin for the pride o' the eye or the sinful lust of 
the flesh?" 

he managed to recall one deadly sin; whereat Satan — 

"Did ye read of that sin in a book?" said he; and Tomlinson said, "Ay!" 

In utter contempt Satan gave him over to his tricksey crew 
to ''winnow him out," as he said; and they did it with unction; 

And back they came with the tattered Thing, as children after play, 

And they said: "The soul that he got from God he has bartered clean away. 

We have threshed a stook of print and book, and winnowed a chattering wind 

And many a soul wherefrom he stole, but his we cannot find: 

We have handled him, we have dandled him, we have seared him to the bone. 

And sure if tooth and nail show truth he has no soul of his own." 



i66 THE LIFE INDEED 

So finally he is sent back to earth again, fit neither for heaven 
nor hell; sent back to carry a sturdier word, the word of man- 
hood initiative and individuality, to the Sons of Men. It is 
Kipling's strong and brutal version of Browning's similar idea 
of the awful court of judgment and award, 

that sad obscure sequestered state 
Where God unmakes but to remake the soul 
He else made first in vain. 

I keep drawing, as you see, upon the poetry and fiction of 
our day, the literature that we all have in our libraries; and 
this I do advisedly, because, when we read it with the key in 
mind, it is alive with flashes of the truth absolute, which piece 
by piece God is all the while revealing to men. But the Bible 
also, whose central theme we are tracing, is a literature; it, 
like our modern literature, is the majestic stream of story and 
poetry and parable by which men like us have put into words 
the law of the spirit of life as it came to light. One main 
difference between it and our literature is, that in its large out- 
come it always holds the balance true; while in modern litera- 
ture it is hard to find a mind, however gifted, who does not 
err by excess on one side or the other. Here, for instance, our 
truculent friend Kipling has so violently emphasized the ele- 
ment of individuality that it seems to fill the whole horizon; 
as if a man's supreme virtue were to have an entity of his own, 
not a hearsay or book-learned or parasitic entity; while our 
exuberantly optimistic friend Browning is just about as far 
over the other way; as if every ruined life had only to await 
some far time and place to be taken into an irresistible Hand, 
and in a way apart from its bent or will remoulded to its 
original heavenly design. Both poets, in their zeal for the 
truth they see, tip the balance a little one-sidedly; their in- 
spiration, as we should say, is not plenary. The fault is, they 
have not reckoned adequately with the law of the spirit of life; 
have an imperfect ear for some chords of its music. The Bible 
writers also, like all fervid seers, overstate things sometimes; 
perhaps they could not wake sluggish attention without; but 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 167 

in the end the Book foots up even, for it has the Spirit with- 
out measure, and as our Lord promised to His disciples, the 
Spirit guides eventually into all truth, by taking of the things 
of His perfect manhood and showing to men. 

But the Spirit also shows them things to come; with the 
coming of full-orbed life to light comes also immortality. Both 
these poets speak in parables of another world; they are set- 
ting forth, in the images current among men, what is to be 
when eternity in the heart comes out beyond the bewilderments 
of time and space. But so also does the Bible speak in par- 
ables, in the same images current among men. To balance up 
these poets' picturings let us turn to the great scripture parable 
of judgment, wherein the Spirit of Christ shows us the undy- 
ing principles of things to come. You know what I mean: 
that tremendous scene in the twenty-fifth of Matthew, where 
before the throne of eternal award are gathered all nations, 
Christian and heathen alike. There too the essential matter 
is not what has been read from a book or deduced from a 
written code, but what has struck into the tissues of individual 
life. Let us for a moment dismiss from our minds that picture 
which has so usurped the main place in the imagination of 
many: of a great menagerie of sheep and goats, or a crowd 
standing right and left before a throne, disembodied souls 
shivering between a glory and a flame. The parable, in fact, 
does not assume that they are disembodied, nor that they are 
in a post-obituary world; and each sentence of judgment fills 
this world as full as it does the other, fills the universe as far 
as the law of the spirit of life extends. You remember on what 
that august Inasmuch as ye have, or have not, done it, turns. 
Not on their being aggressively individual, as in Kipling; 
though each for himself they are, and the judgment is indi- 
vidual; not on the question of soul integrity or disintegration, 
as in Browning; though this is a profound element of their 
case; but solely on the disinterested love and faith that is in 
each man, on how the spirit of their life has been directed. 
Those souls have not been buying heaven on their merits, nor 
incurring hell as more or less blundering culprits; there is an 



i68 THE LIFE INDEED 

entire lack of that grading in their awards which such a stand- 
ard would require. They have just been living their life, a 
life as spontaneous as breathing; and the question turns on 
what that life has been, as it acted on man as man. The souls 
on the one side, you remember, are surprised to find that they 
have been living a life of eternal blessedness, the self-same life 
that is in their Judge, when they did not know it; just by 
letting that divine instinct of love and faith have free course 
with the least and neediest, whom Christ identifies with Him- 
self as brothers. The souls on the other side, too, are sur- 
prised — why? Not because they have done such base and 
heinous things; indeed they seem to think they have been very 
worthy and respectable people, ready to do Christ a good turn 
when they saw Him, — but they never saw Him. They might 
have seen Him all the while; He had delegated His presence 
ever3rwhere among them; but they had steeled their cold 
hearts, or left unopened their sluggish and indifferent hearts, 
to the plight in which, in the person of the neediest and un- 
worthiest ones. He stood before them. In other words, it is 
because of what they have left undone; they have not let out 
their personality in the one direction worthy of full manhood, 
the free outward current of love and faith. Man's salvation 
— the word salvation, you know, means the soul's wholeness 
and health, — man's immortality, lies in his being the glad 
vehicle of the grace of God; that is the truth of the parable. 
But, you say, the eternal element, — that awful spectre of 
everlasting punishment, — what of that? Would you live in 
a world of law and order and have it otherwise? Just think 
out what would be if some day the higher order of things, in 
which we trust and rejoice, should reverse itself, and an apa- 
thetic unloving heart be happy. It is the eternal law of being, 
unaffected by lapse of time or change of worlds, that love and 
faith in the life are their own blessedness and light, and that 
the lack of these, the deadness of apathy no less than the burn- 
ing of hate, has inherent in it the unending curse of the Evil 
One. Take it or leave it: that is the tremendous alternative 
revealed in the perfected evolution of manhood. 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 169 

Such is the unescapable ideal, when life and immortality 
come to light together. I have already tried your patience, 
perhaps too long, in tracing its elements; but two or three 
things remain to say, belonging especially to the fact that this 
is the life, the motion, of that initiative which we call the 
spirit. On this larger scale, as I said, everything is large in 
proportion; and we must accommodate our thought to it, all 
along the line. 

Well, in the first place, you have noticed that this parable 
of judgment does not say anything to either party about the 
sins they have committed or avoided, — in the sense, I mean, 
of the transgression of law, or mistakes and blunders, or fail- 
ure to live up to their moral obligations. It is all about the 
spirit in which they have lived; that attitude toward their 
brother-men, of active helpfulness or inert indifference, which 
has become to them a second nature, as instinctive as breath- 
ing. Strange, is it not, to men who under the long empire of 
law had got their whole life interpreted in terms of a huge 
debit and credit account? The debit and credit idea, the 
question of obligation and justice, has wholly disappeared, and 
the free spirit of life has taken its place. Mercy, it would 
seem, has swallowed up judgment, and the sins, as such, are 
forgiven, blotted out of the book. This is what has been held 
out before men, as a heartening influence, a reassuring hope, 
all through their twilight period, when they were as children 
stumbling along towards the light, or as bond-slaves with the 
inevitable burdens of life upon them. Where sin abounded 
grace did much more abound. ''All manner of sin and blas- 
phemy," as our Lord says, ''shall be forgiven unto men." All? 
All except one; and here comes in the awfullest revelation of 
the Bible. There is one sin that cannot be forgiven. "Who- 
soever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be 
forgiven him ; but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, 
it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in 
the world to come." You know the vague speculations that 
have clustered round this mysterious sin against the Holy 
Spirit; I remember how, when I was a boy, people used to con- 



I70 THE LIFE INDEED 

jecture, with bated breath, what particular vice or iniquity it 
might be, and wonder if a man might fall into it without being 
aware of the fact. It seemed like a kind of trap which the 
arbitrary Power above had set and hid in the way, for men to 
tumble into inadvertently. But I think the scale and level of 
truth we have reached removes the mystery. The sin against 
the Holy Spirit — the spirit of wholeness and health — is just 
the rejection of the spirit of life. It takes a peculiarly har- 
dened, not to say utterly perverted and fiendish, heart to re- 
ject the gracious spirit of life, when its motions and fruits are 
seen. You remember what it was that called forth this as- 
sertion of our Lord's. The Pharisees, seeing Him do the self- 
same works of goodwill and love which as Judge He 
pronounces blessed, said, in a frenzied antipathy of bigotry, 
^'Why, this is devil's work; this fellow is in league with Beelze- 
bub." Jesus did not resent this malignant word as against His 
person; but, he said, the spirit that can say such a thing, the 
spirit that would bring forth the fruits of such a verdict, why, 
it is the polar opposite of anything like forgiveness, love, help- 
fulness, faith; how can a spirit that cannot forgive be for- 
given? It stops, so to say, the circulation of the current of 
life, which is flowing from the Father of spirits to the least and 
lowest corner of His creation. So the matter, with all its aw- 
ful portent, comes back to the same test of life that we have 
seen applied in the parable of judgment; simple, yet as radical 
as life itself. On this subject let our American Hawthorne, 
who you know made such lifelong specialty of the pathology 
of the human heart, speak the defining word. In his story of 
Ethan Brand, you remember, he portrays a man who, in the 
cold spirit of research, set out to find the unpardonable sin; 
and he roamed the world over, stopping at nothing that seemed 
to promise a solution of his problem; blighting hearts and 
ruining many a life, without mercy or compunction; only to 
find at last that the sin was in his own heart, and had 
so demonized his nature that his very laugh caused a shudder 
in whoever heard it. He had come back from his long quest 
to the place where years before he had worked as a humble 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 171 

lime-burner ; now a highly educated man, with a sardonic sense 
of utter separateness from his kind, whom one and all he de- 
spised, and with an intellect as keen and hard as steel; "but," 
Hawthorne goes on to say, ''where was the heart? That, in- 
deed, had withered, — had contracted, — had hardened, — 
had perished! It has ceased to partake of the universal throb. 
He had lost his hold of the magnetic chain of humanity. He 
was no longer a brother-man, opening the chambers or the 
dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy sympathy, 
which gave him a right to share in all its secrets; he was now 
a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his ex- 
periment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be his 
puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such de- 
grees of crime as were demanded for his study." 

Such an extreme of human perversity must necessarily be 
exceptional in actual fact; there are too many motions of our 
God-given nature working against the completion of it. 
Through some chink the power of disinterested love or self- 
forgetting faith will filter in: through the family, or the lover, 
or the comrade, or the country, or the cause of generous en- 
deavor, nay, even through the art or research in which for the 
sake of the world's welfare or instruction a man may lose his 
selfishness. There are many feeders, when we come to think 
of it, to our soul's health and wholeness; we do not have to 
get it all out of a book; many avenues by which the light and 
life, that are smiting themselves into the universe, come in to 
vitalize in various degrees our individual being, and help us 
live, as God lives, for other than selfish issues. The very work 
we do, which we love and try to make prevail for the upbuild- 
ing of the world because in some individual feature we can do 
it better than any one else, is a means of grace. And so the 
rank and file of us, musing as we are on how to be a strength 
and uplift to some less endowed comrade, and how thus to 
leave the world better than we found it, are in the position of 
learners undergoing a gracious education; the fact that we are 
not beyond forgiveness, and that we can bank on sufficient 
grace, is proof of this. For forgiveness is essentially a recipro- 



172 THE LIFE INDEED 

cal thing; it cannot exist one-sidedly; the fulness of life that 
we receive is a fulness of grace for grace. It was there for 
Ethan Brand all the while^ just as the air and the water and 
the food of earth all the days of his hardening career kept him 
alive and contributed to the discipline of that merciless in- 
tellect; it was there though his sin was unpardonable; but be- 
cause he would not open his being to it, by loving as he was 
loved, and committing himself according to the committal that 
life itself had made to him, it must remain an unfinished thing, 
a proffer and not a gift. It cannot be otherwise; it is the law 
of the spirit of life. So the prayer that is taught us, by which 
our daily object-lesson is kept in mind, is, 'Torgive us our 
debts, as we forgive our debtors." 

But by the same pervasiveness of grace for grace the other 
extreme of the scale is just as majestic as the one we have con- 
sidered was terrible; a height as great as the depth. As in the 
tremendous gift of spiritual freedom there inheres the possi- 
bility of a sin unpardonable, so in the same divine trust in- 
heres the potency of a well-being which no discount of flesh 
or lower nature or evil heredity can impair beyond forgiveness. 
And this is it. This spirit of life, moving freely as ^'faith which 
worketh by love," redeems the whole man. No accumulated 
debt of the lower nature can over-balance it; it is what the 
Scripture calls the power of an endless life. We have done 
our best, I am inclined to think, to make the idea of redemp- 
tion unreal and remote, by regarding it as a sort of churchly 
magic, and narrowing its operation to the historic work of one 
Person. It is Christ, we say, who redeems us, and other foun- 
dation can no man lay. That is profoundly true. But as 
our study has revealed Christ in idea, as the perfect manhood 
after which the spirit of man has dimly struggled, the idea of 
the redemption He works is correspondingly enlarged and clari- 
fied. We have, in fact, found the essential Christ; found Him 
in the spirit of grace and the courage of faith. Suppose this 
essence of highest manhood, by whatever historic agency it 
got there, becomes the life and motive power of the individual 
man. Well, this redeems his nature; wherever he is, America 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 173 

or Timbuctoo, whenever he lives, twentieth century or dark 
ages; redeems him according to the completeness with which 
it possesses him. Our best approach to the notion of redemp- 
tion, I think, is the simplest; just through our everyday cur- 
rent terms. We say of a man he has some disagreeable 
unpleasant things about him — I suppose that may be said 
of many of us — or he has the relics of old vices and evil habi- 
tudes; but he has this redeeming character, that he is square 
as a die, you know where to find him, and that he will stand 
loyally and comradelike by any one in misfortune or need. 
And that is the kind of man we can tie to. We can forgive him 
a great deal, we can forgive him everything, for the sake of 
that. Well, don't you see, that is what redeems him ; the good- 
hearted, common-sense world pronounces him redeemed by 
that controlling quahty; and do you suppose God will do less? 
And this simple pronouncement translates these great con- 
cepts of love and faith into the idiom of every common life; 
you can see how they apply to the laborer, and the outcast, 
and the business man, and the man who is lost in the crowd, 
no less than to the church member and the millionaire and the 
man of high position. It is the magnetic pulsation of the great 
loving, suffering heart of humanity that redeems him, that 
makes him an uplifting and vitalizing power, and therefore 
in essence a new man. Every lowliest position in life is its 
opportunity; its leaven is pervasive everywhere. The living 
spirit of the universe is there, working according to its sphere ; 
as the mystic beauty of the ocean resides in the rill and the 
dewdrop. For what is being square as a die, or whatever 
President Roosevelt called "the square deal," but just the ma- 
jestic fulfilling of the law of truth; and what is standing by 
your brother-man in need and trouble, but the practical dy- 
namic of love? It is the one direction in which life may be 
so focussed as to be aware of its essential unity and common 
centre. All else — knowledge, culture, money-getting, ambi- 
tion, power — is centrifugal ; it scatters men into classes and 
warring interests and tends to hardness of heart. But here 
on this level neither God nor man can be a respecter of per- 



174 THE LIFE INDEED 

sons; the race may have these separating tendencies, but this 
resolves them and redeems the man. 

You know what a role this simple idea of the redeeming 
trait has played in literature through the past half-century. 
The most popular theme of poetry and fiction, perhaps, has 
been some form of heroic self-sacrifice, or the finding of a true 
and loving heart in the most unpromising men and places. It 
is this detection of the soul of good in things evil that has set 
authors to raking the slums and the mining camps and the 
cow-boy ranches and the army barracks of far India; always 
there is brought to light some pearl of sterling character and 
unobtrusive sacrifice which has made the most sordid sur- 
roundings and the roughest manners forgivable and beautiful. 
Why, this aspect of redemption has almost become the staple 
of our thoughts of life. At the same time, we must confess, 
this same theme, I think beyond anything else, has had a 
powerful dissolving influence with the masses of men, to keep 
them out of the churches; due perhaps to the fact that the 
idea is just now in that unbalanced excess which holds men's 
eyes from seeing more than one great thing at once. For in 
the discovery that unexacting love and self-sacrificing faith 
are the one redemption of manhood, men have got the mistaken 
prejudice that the well-fed and prosperous churchman stands 
for something alien to this, something exclusive and Pharisaic, 
and that while thus the poor have not the gospel preached to 
them, the heart of the matter, the real saving quality, can 
just as well be found elsewhere, and maintained apart from 
ecclesiastical machinery. Of course this prejudice is wrong, 
and I think temporary. But does it not behoove us, who love 
the place where the saving Name is named, to see to it that 
the power of redemption do not escape us, even by one motion 
of exclusiveness, and take up its recognized abode in places 
where our refinement and taste have perhaps been indulging 
a similar prejudice? Let us not lose sight of the real heart of 
the matter; we can afford to crucify our tastes a little for the 
sake of seeing straight. Literature has gloried, perhaps over- 
much, in setting forth its new theme coarsely and brutally; 



THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 175 

but the idea is there, and it has found men's hearts, assuring 
them, perhaps by its very rudeness, that nothing is henceforth 
to be despised as common or unclean. Chemistry, as a pro- 
fessor of it once remarked to me, recognizes no such thing as 
dirt or stench ; it is too much concerned with the vital elements 
of God's world for that. You remember that poem of John 
Hay's, which perhaps did a leading part to set the ball of this 
new theme rolling; wherein a swearing, reckless steamboat 
engineer, when his boat was on fire, held her bow against the 
bank until every last man was safe ashore, and because he 
would not desert his post, bravely gave up his life. Here is 
the verdict that took the popular heart, and has been repeated 
in many a variation ever since: 

He weren't no saint, — but at jedgment 

I'd run my chance with Jim, 
'Longside of some pious gentlemen 

That wouldn't shook hands with him. 
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing, — 

And went for it thar and then; 
And Christ ain't a going to be too hard 

On a man that died for men. 

The poem, like Kipling's and Browning's, has struck for a 
single point of truth, brutally and straight from the shoulder; 
but the point is central, and it translates the redeeming ca- 
pacity of manhood into the coarsest vernacular. Let us not 
suffer its rudeness to switch us off on a side-issue, while we 
gather up our skirts to avoid the contact. For in its heart it 
is the same thing that we are coming to love and reverence as 
the principle of holiest manhood; it is, albeit uncouth, a 
homely echo of the parable by which Christ judges the world. 

Thus, I have tried to trace what this life of ours is, when, 
at the fulness of the revealing time, it has become a free in- 
itiative, a spirit, and when in the light that has risen to guide 
it, it has evolved its own higher law of working. We have seen 
what man has it in him to do when he does as he likes, and 
when love has vitalized his committal to his world. It is a 
divine pattern, an ideal, which now the Christian ages are to 



176 THE LIFE INDEED 

make real, by making it the natural way of living. And now 
for the slow planting of it in individual hearts, man by man, 
the naturalization of it in a gainsaying world. It takes long; 
but its season of springtide and summer and harvest is a season 
in which a thousand years are as one day. And we cannot get 
round this fact, that it is the law of risen manhood, and not 
one jot or tittle can pass until all is fulfilled. Our business, as 
we see it, is just to live it unreservedly, and by life and word 
to teach men so. ^'Write the things which thou has seen," 
says the Revealer to St. John in Patmos, "and the things which 



V 

THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 

WHAT, AS MATTER OF RECORDED FACT, CAME OF 

PERFECT COMMITTAL TO THE LAWS OF 

THE SPIRIT OF LIFE 

I. From the Exceeding High Mountain 

II. Thus It Becometh Us 

ni. To This End Was I Born 

IV. The Decease Accomplished at Jerusalem 



V 

THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 

HISTORICALLY speaking, the chapter we have just 
finished has run far ahead of our subject. We have, 
so to say, shpped the cable of the actual and launched 
out on the ocean of the ideal; and this, by the methods of re- 
search that prevail in our time, is something not unlike a sin. 
For a generation or more now, men have been so absorbed in 
the contemplation of what has been and its laws that they have 
suffered themselves to become wellnigh color-blind to the all- 
pervading prophecy and potency of what is to be, which is 
the law of the spirit of life. And so here at the opening of the 
twentieth Christian century, we are confronted with the 
strange fact that the vision of the life absolute, with its corol- 
lary of immortality, counts for hardly more as a grounded con- 
viction than it did in the twilight period of Old Testament 
days. For this there may be various reasons. I can think of 
two main ones. One is that while the great abysmal current 
of the spirit has all the while been silently heaving toward its 
flood, — 

Such a tide as moving seems asleep, 
Too full for sound and foam, — 

yet it has encountered so many eddies and cross-currents of 
temporary endeavor, so many things that make noise and tur- 
moil, that men have inveterately tended to take the surface 
for the eternal depths. Another reason, I am tempted to think, 
is that men's minds have sometimes become darkened from 
sheer excess of light. They have hesitated to admit the di- 
vine, not because it was hidden but because it was so evident; 
like the bluff, impulsive Peter they have cried out, ''Depart 
from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord." Of course they 
would be slow to own this to themselves, or to declare 

179 



i8o THE LIFE INDEED 

for darkness rather than Hght. Their fault is rather like the 
fault of those who have an ear for music, and delight in it after 
the inner man, but put it by as the music of the spheres or 
of a more ethereal future. As a recent writer puts it, speaking 
of Plato and his idealizing mood: ^'Doubtless the concord he 
conceived was beautiful. But the dissonances he would have 
silenced, but which, with ever augmenting force, peal and 
crash, from his day to ours, through the echoing vault of time, 
embody, as I am apt to think, a harmony more august than 
even he was able to imagine, and in their intricate succession 
weave the plan of a world-symphony too high to be appre- 
hended save in part by our grosser sense, but perceived with 
delight by the pure intelligence of immortal spirits." This, 
you see, is a veritable recoil from excess of light; the reluc- 
tance of man, even though with such ideals surging within 
him, to own that he is an immortal spirit, and that such music 
is just the idiom of his immortality. The light is good, he 
says, is glorious; but it is not practical; the use of it must be 
postponed to a more favorable state. So he shades his eyes 
from it and turns again to the shadows; ignoring the com- 
pleted design for the chips and dust-heaps of history, in his 
search for something more workable and feasible. As a result 
the thing that he most desperately needs appeals in vain. You 
remember how Browning makes the aged John, as he is dying, 
set forth this idea: 

I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ 
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 
All questions in the earth and out of it, 
And has so far advanced thee to be wise. 
Wouldst thou unprove this to re-prove the proved? 
In life's mere minute, with power to use that proof, 
Leave knowledge and revert to how it sprung? 
Thou hast it; use it and forthwith, or die! 

Then by a telling figure he illustrates what is the real ailment 
of men who so perversely reopen a clear case: 

For I say, this is death and the sole death. 
When a man's loss comes to him from his gain, 
Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance, 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE i8i 

And lack of love from love made manifest; 

A lamp's death when, replete with oil, it chokes; 

A stomach's when, surcharged with food, it starves. 

There is something in this thought of the life indeed which 
we must face and resolve. When the ideal becomes so high, 
as in the evolutionary course it is bound to do, its first effect 
is to give us pause. Is this, we ask, the law of our higher na- 
ture, these the tremendous exactions of love and faith, when 
the fulness of the time is here, and our duty henceforth, if 
we would be free and perfect men, is to take these ideals, 
these potencies within us, and make them real? And so our 
tendency is, either to stand dazed and benumbed before them, 
thus leaving them practically inoperative; or, else, deeming 
them a misfit on earth, to postpone the working of them to 
some realm out of time and space, to some mystic heaven, 
which we dread as much as we desire because there, as we 
think, we shall have to be good. A misfit here, we say, be- 
cause here are all these eddies and cross-currents of spirit, and 
all this law of sin in our members ; we could love God and our 
neighbor if it were not for these, but here alas, we must fight 
the devil with fire. 

Well, we saw the deadlock that paralyzed the growing spirit 
of man, when the ideal was not yet in sight; here we seem to 
have encountered a similar one when it is. What then can be 
done? What shall overcome this strange inertia of the spirit, 
and start the wheels of being out of the clay in which they are 
again stuck fast? There has been no lack of effort, no lack 
of experimenting on life. Men have proved abundantly that 
manhood has a surplusage of being, a mighty overflow, which 
must needs be laid out somewhere. As Ruskin puts it: ^Tt 
has tried fighting, and preaching, and fasting, bu3dng and sell- 
ing, pomp and parsimony, pride and humiliation, — every pos- 
sible manner of existence in which it would conjecture there 
was any happiness or dignity; and all the while, as it bought, 
sold, and fought, and fasted, and wearied itself with policies, 
and ambitions, and self-denials, God had placed its real happi- 
ness in the keeping of" — well, never mind what; it is not 



1 82 THE LIFE INDEED 

to our purpose here, and man, I am persuaded, has in him a 
higher hunger than for happiness. All these things have been 
carried to the pitch of heroism. Self-denial and asceticism 
have attended them all, and all are just as susceptible to fanat- 
icism and insane excess as is religion itself. Ruskin says 
further: "If there were any other mistake that the world could 
make, it would of course make it. But I see not that there is 
any other. ... It has now made its experiments in every 
possible direction but the right one; and it seems that it must, 
at last, try the right one, in a mathematical necessity." So 
it surely does. But now that the spirit of life has evolved its 
law, and the one way of love and faith stands before men for 
adoption, men recoil almost in dismay. It is not workable, 
they say. Heroic as they are in every other direction, here 
their heroism fails ignominously. The ideal has revealed it- 
self as 

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard 

and so, while it may do for poets and musicians, whose busi- 
ness is to dream and sing, for the hard-headed man of affairs 
it is too evidently a misfit. Pusillanimous mortals ! the summit 
of life has uncovered their weak point. They are afraid to 
go over and take possession of their kingdom; afraid of what 
some one else will do, some cheater or traitor, who as soon as 
they dare to love and trust, will take a mean advantage. If 
only it were not an individual matter, wherein each must take 
the initiative for himself, how much more feasible it would be. 
If only love could be legislated and sworn to, like an oath of 
fealty; the whole human race dropping its weapons and agree- 
ing with one consent to lift together, heave ho ! what a heaven 
on earth would spring up, to be sure! That is what, as matter 
of fact, men's dreams of social and national regeneration to- 
day reduce themselves to. But no: that does not satisfy other 
conditions of the ideal ; that would be universal bondage again, 
under another name, not freedom at all; besides love is not 
love at all, but merely good manners, when it must depend for 
its existence on law. Its breath and finer spirit evaporate just 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 183 

as soon as it binds itself to the letter and the oath. Love and 
faith cannot organize a trust; they must be a life-giving spirit, 
they must be individual. Men cannot live this highest ideal 
in a mass; they must come in, and keep in, one by one. You 
remember the whimsical parable by which Dr. Holmes set 
forth the failure of massed play on the part of humanity. He 
figured the whole world as having once agreed together that 
at a certain specified moment all should raise a mighty shout 
in unison; and when the moment came it proved to be the 
only absolutely silent moment that the world ever knew, for 
every man was listening to hear how mighty the shout would 
be. Well, the moment of the fulness of the time comes, and 
men have eyes to see in what its glory consists; but to this 
day, through all their civilizations and communal interests, 
they are waiting, and listening, and wrangling and making 
oath-bound treaties, until all shall be compelled to pull to- 
gether, and no one shall take advantage of his neighbor. And 
then they say their ideal is not workable. No: it is not, on 
such principles. 

Earth is silent, ominously silent, when men try to shout in 
unison. But there was one man, a simple artisan in an obscure 
Galilean village, who dared to bear His whole weight, without 
reservation or flinching, on the completed ideal of life; and his 
still small voice is heard round the world and through the 
eternities. Under the tumult it sounds ever, the sweet under- 
tone of peace and goodwill; through the jarring discords of 
sects and opinions and manifold quarrels of men its uniform 
note is heard, and in the end it compels attention; the very 
date that we write at the head of our letters and documents 
numbers the years of his gracious message to the world. The 
heroism that was so lacking is here at last, calm and magnifi- 
cently simple; and never, in battle or physical peril, was hero- 
ism like it. We are resuming history now, after our long 
excursion into the ideal; and this is the world-filling historic 
fact. Nay, the ideal itself did not get into words, until it had 
this historic fact as datum; we could not speak the dialect of 
the new life, or realize its rhythms and cadences, until we 



1 84 THE LIFE INDEED 

heard it spoken, and the word itself had breath, working with 
human hands the creed of creeds. A word is the embodiment 
of an idea; and this Hfe was God's idea of men, and man's idea 
of his own manhood, which had so long struggled for expres- 
sion. We cannot state in simplest terms the largeness of this 
historic fact without seeming to invest it with miracle. Yet 
how sane and sincere it all is; the echo of our central being; 
the plainest man can understand it. It does seem as if here 
we were face to face with the secret mind of evolution; as if 
there must needs be revealed an individual, the individual, in 
whom should be typed the elements of personal evolution. 
There must be a pioneer in every exploration, a practical de- 
signer of every noble edifice. Somebody, some man like our- 
selves, with our manhood capacities of mind and spirit, must 
translate into act and life every upbuilding idea; and as the 
idea is more momentous, his originative spirit must be stronger, 
his personality more imposing. Must this not be supremely 
so in the highest ideal of all, the profoundest movement of the 
spirit of life that ever took place on earth? How large this 
idea is, and what demands it makes of manhood, we have seen. 
Think then of the man who is large enough to take it in, and 
strong enough to live it. No matter if he is a carpenter; no 
matter if he does not cry nor lift up; no matter if he has not 
where to lay his head. Life is more than livelihood, and a 
man's life consists not in the abundance of things he posses- 
seth. The idea it is, and the perfectly adequate committal 
of spirit to it, which makes him great. Greater therefore than 
man, a miracle of personality, with hopelessly unattainable 
elements? Jesus made no such pretension; all the gifts He 
brought are placed freely at our disposal. But certainly He 
is greater than any of our race have been, before or since; 
though His spirit has begotten many a noble copy of His great- 
ness, and many a martyr to it. One and all, however, lacked 
somehow of the fulness, as the echo lacks the substance and 
volume of the original sound; then too there is to be reckoned 
with the greatness of the pioneer effort and committal, like 
the energy of a chemical reaction in its nascent state. But 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 185 

mainly their lack was in completeness of committal; to all of 
them at some flinching point, or some occultation of wisdom, 
His voice comes as it did to Peter, "O thou of little 
faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?" Men hold back and 
tremble, or try to get their fellows to make the start, or wait 
for some signal when all shall go together. And so they lose 
themselves in the crowd; their soul is not their own, is not 
free. That is the history of the mass of humanity. The law 
of the species, or of the race, or of the land, or of the social 
convention, is still their tyrant. They are not the ones to 
overcome the inertia of manhood. What is needed, it would 
seem, at this crisis-point of individual evolution, is just a man 
who will let himself go, in the perfect abandon of the free 
spirit of life, trusting that the native powers of manhood, as 
trained by law and counseled by wisdom, are sound and true, 
and holding that faith patiently, in spite of evil seeming, until 
it has justified itself in the answering heart of man. This, it 
would seem, is required in the large scientific plan, if the com- 
pletely evolved personality is ever to come to light; an indi- 
vidual is needed to stake out the way which henceforth indi- 
viduaHty, free from the trammels of the species, must take. 

Such a man has actually lived among us; has lived a life 
so common and approachable that all may avail themselves of 
its light; and yet all His life was heroic, in the calm heroism 
of daring to trust the spirit of life to the uttermost, and ven- 
turing on the unexplored ocean of love and faith, undismayed 
by the storms of consequence, and consistent to whatever end. 
This is why I call His life, as He went about doing good, the 
supreme historic venture. That, when we reckon with all its 
freely accepted elements, is what it amounts to. 

What, by fair human view, was the special outfit of Jesus 
for such a venture as this? I am not referring now to the 
endowments that connected Him with His nation and its af- 
fairs — His advantages of residence, education, occupation, 
position in society; — these, in the large, we have fully in 
mind, and know that they created so little distinction for Him 
that even a near-by neighbor exclaimed, ^'Can any good thing 



i86 THE LIFE INDEED 

come out of Nazareth?" He owed as little to environment as 
does any common man. What I refer to rather is the endow- 
ment that connects Him with the unseen, and with the tide of 
new life that was waiting only for such venture to break forth 
and flood the world. We look perhaps for some super-eminent 
saintliness, or eloquence, or sense of leadership; but these it 
was not, and the still unsaved world had always had these. 
Well, let us ask John the Baptist; he as the authentic embodi- 
ment of the old prophetic insight was entitled to judge; and 
among them that were born of women there had risen no 
greater. He, you know, with all his spiritual aggressiveness, 
felt his own limitation, and the limitation of all that he repre- 
sented; knew that he was not the coming One. He spoke a 
word of God, but not the word; he was a voice, not the full- 
orbed life; a keynote and prelude, not the symphony and 
diapason. But of Jesus he said, as if he were defining a whole 
manhood in Him, ^'He whom God hath sent speaketh the 
words of God: for God giveth not the spirit by measure unto 
him." Here we have the outfit of Jesus: the spirit without 
measure. The spirit has been as it were doled out before, as 
men could contain it and act upon it; as food had been doled 
out in Jerusalem, according to EzekieFs prophecy, when men 
ate bread by weight and with care, and drank water by meas- 
ure and with astonishment. Here at last was a Man who had 
opened all His being to the influx of the spirit, and so had 
become a pure initiative and imparter of life; could let himself 
go, abandoned as it were to the current of being within Him. 
And the consciousness in which He could do this was just the 
simple consciousness of being the Son of God, with all that 
interplay of love and power which inheres therein. "The 
Father loveth the Son," said the Baptist, "and hath given all 
things into his hand." No more the spirit of bondage, again 
to fear, but the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, 
Father. You see how many of the elements we have traced 
meet here and are resolved: freedom, adultness, the son^s 
estate succeeding the slave's, the manhood majority and in- 
heritance succeeding the period of nonage, the release from 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 187 

tutors and governors. Where the spirit of the Lord is, there 
is Hberty; and where the spirit is without measure there is 
the mighty pioneer outfit, the impulse for the supreme his- 
toric venture. Simple and obvious it is, when we see it, but 
tremendous. 

This word venture is just another name for faith. That, 
you know, is how I have defined faith: a venture of the will 
and life on a course which, by worldly and pagan view, with 
all its hedging and caution, is just as unreasonable as it can 
be. He was bearing His full weight, and without reservation, 
on life as He saw it; in the conviction that manhood life is 
from God and of God. To venture thus was to work that life 
out in the dues and duties that come to Him, high or lowly; 
to wreak Himself on life as a man of men, not merely as a 
Jew, or a king, or a priest, or a prophet; to work out its com- 
mon details and teach men so, sharing life with them. No 
small thing this, as a pioneer thing, naturalizing a standard of 
life unheard of before. Can we call such simple faith as this 
anything short of heroic? 

Now this venture, fitting accurately as it does into the 
Bible scheme of higher evolution, has its scientific significance, 
no less than its religious. It focuses our attention on a work 
big with results for all the world and all life, present and to 
come. On its immensely larger scale it has all the marks 
of penetrative wisdom, keen testing, verification, choice of 
practical agencies, which we associate with such men as Koch 
and Pasteur, as in their quiet laboratories they devise means 
for the healing and happiness of men. Nazareth and Caper- 
naum, the wilderness and the Holy City, in those years 30 to 
33, are a world laboratory; and the eyes of God and angels 
are fixed on the patient but mighty research that is going on 
there, the exploration of the evolutionary secrets and healthful 
remedies of life. And that life of Jesus, we say it though 
with reverence as literally as we would of any study what- 
ever, is the most colossal scientific experiment that the world 
has ever seen. This I say is literal matter of fact; we have 
only to project it on its cosmic background and its evolution- 



1 88 THE LIFE INDEED 

ary setting to see it so. The experiment was made in a 
remote corner of the world; but that does not matter; our 
laboratories are all remote from the crowds of men, and no 
palatial structures. It was made by a humble, unobtrusive 
villager; but that does not matter; we did not know Koch 
and Pasteur until their deeds made them great. And if it was 
well and thoroughly made it was made once for all; it need 
not be repeated or corrected; it needs only to be utilized 
and naturalized, in the fulness that all we have received of 
Him, and grace for grace. As matter of fact, the world has 
no occasion to demand repetition or correction of it; they 
could not conceive how to add truer vital elements to it; and 
they are still far, very far, from having exhausted its bene- 
fits. The experiment has abundantly proved, and is increas- 
ingly proving, its entire success; and men have crowned Jesus 
not only Saviour and King, but the supreme scientific evolu- 
tionist of the ages. 

That whole-souled venture of His, that pioneer experiment, 
has also its literary bearing; for literature, you know, is just 
the getting of the spirit of manhood into illuminative words. 
The designation that comes to be given to Him is an essen- 
tially literary one: the Word who was with God; the expres- 
sion of God's idea to men, and of man's idea of his holiest 
manhood. 'Wherefore," says a scripture writer, ''wherefore, 
holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider the 
Apostle and High Priest of our profession, Christ Jesus." 
That is what, in various phases and involvements, with appKca- 
tions great and small, in many lights broken or crude or pure, 
the world of men has been doing ever since — considering 
Christ and getting education from it. The Apostle — one 
sent forth from the presence of the Father of spirits; there- 
fore God's representative and ambassador to men; and to this 
day men have not found or desired a representative more 
answering to their highest conception. The High Priest — 
who stands between men and God, to voice their prayers and 
embody what they would fain be; who thus is the representa- 
tive and spokesman of men to God; and to this day men have 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 189 

neither sought nor desired to be better represented. So far 
forth the word, the idea, is finished. This we know because 
Messianism as a prophecy, that prophecy of a coming Man 
which once focussed the hopes of the world, has disappeared, 
its complete fulfilment being taken for granted. But the 
Messianic idea is an idea that grows for ever; its involvements, 
its perennial applications to life, are never finished. It still 
has its prophetic pulsation, greater than ever; only the ictus 
of it has changed; not the coming man now, but the coming 
life. In two directions this idea is working, intensively and 
extensively; the direction of its depth, and the direction of 
its breadth; in other words, the prophetic soul of the world 
is asking, on the one hand. What shall become of the indi- 
vidual? and on the other. What shall become of the race, of 
society? Just now this latter inquiry has the floor; and so 
predominantly that for the moment it seems to fill the horizon. 
Questions of social betterment and of the massing and mu- 
tualization of large human interests — how to regulate capi- 
tal and labor and rates and commerce and industry and edu- 
cation, how, in a word, to make the vast social organism what 
it should be — are the overwhelming burden and pain of the 
age, like an uneasy obsession. And meanwhile the question of 
individual salvation has quite passed into eclipse; and men 
have almost ceased to inquire or care about personal immor- 
tality, except here and there in vague psychic research and 
spiritualism, — as if immortality could lie in that unsavory 
direction! The most of men don't want it, if that is all there 
is to it; they would rather save their interests for something 
of real uplift and importance. Well, the situation has its 
noble features; noble, and eminently wholesome. We think 
infinitely more of a man who is toiling and studying to regen- 
erate his fellow-men and to make the corporate life more 
livable, than of a man who, like a miser with his gold, is 
scheming how to evade the fire and secure safety for his own 
measly greedy little soul. Yes: we have no occasion for pes- 
simism about the race so long as the hunger to be saviours and 
benefactors so pervasively possesses the souls of men. But 



I90 THE LIFE INDEED 

just here it will pay us to release ourselves a little from this 
sociological obsession, and return to the question of the indi- 
vidual. After all, the individual, our individual personality, 
has the first claim. We make a grievous mistake if we think 
that mankind is to be saved in a lump; nay, the undeniable 
good that we can bring to them in a lump, by legislation or 
sentiment or public benefaction, is only good of a lower and 
material kind, such as expresses itself in terms of comfort 
and ease and wealth and general externalism. And our return 
to the intensive side of our prophecy, to the individual life with 
its ideal endowment of freedom and independence, does not 
quench but rather intensifies our impulse to promote such good 
as this in the world. It is indeed the one true spring of it. 
Christ, the unique individual, is by that very rounded fulness 
of individuality the representative of the living God, "who," 
as St. Paul says, ''is the Saviour of all men, specially of those 
that believe." His great venture of love and faith began with 
the neighbors at His side, with the villagers of Galilee, and 
His cousins by the lake-side, and the sick who gravitated to 
Him in their feebleness; and He helped them not merely by 
healing, or by preaching better wages and shorter hours, but 
by giving each man of them a new idea to live by. His venture 
was directed to making regenerate individuals of them; and 
he left the rest, the social betterment, to follow by natural con- 
sequence, by their own individual motion. 

We did well to dismiss our care for immortality, so long as 
it was merely a refined dream of greed, or a question of going 
to heaven when we die. For if personal immortality is any- 
thing, it is the polar opposite of this; it belongs, as we have 
seen, to the outward and love-current of life, not to the inward 
and selfish one. This is the truth that Christ came to estab- 
lish, when He brought life and immortality to light. But His 
immortality, you see, is not revealed as a thing to work for at 
all. It does not come as wages, or reward, or even as rest. It 
does not contemplate that we should get tired of what we are 
doing now, so as to need rest; or ashamed of it, so as to need 
a change and a kind of cleaning up. It is, in fact, merely an 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 191 

incident of life, which, with the spirit of Hfe in control, we can 
leave to take care of itself. To take thought for immortality, 
in this narrow sense of personal safety, is not of the idiom of 
that faith which we are now defining as a disinterested venture 
of life. One of the most salient elements in this historic ven- 
ture of Jesus was His magnificent disregard of what would be- 
come of Him as the sequel of His chosen work. He might be 
revered as divine, He might be scorned and put to death; it 
was all the same, so far as the integrity and thoroughness of 
the work were concerned. This feature of his life is what St. 
Paul honors in his idea of the Kevcocns, or self-emptying, 
of Christ; ''who," he says, ''being in the form of God did not 
deem his equality with God a prize, a thing to be clutched at 
and maintained at all hazards; but made himself of no repu- 
tation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made 
in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man 
he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even the 
death of the cross." This is how the Christ-life looks from the 
unseen places, where the divine who is in act to smite His na- 
ture into manhood is initiating the movement of uttermost love. 
From the human side, as we see it in the deeds and words of 
Jesus of Nazareth, it has a simpler look, being translated into 
the present-world idiom; but its principle is the same, its 
primal impulse is identical, starting as it does away inward in 
that sacred withdrawn centre where the spirit of God is wit- 
nessing with the spirit of man. In this manhood idiom it is 
simply taking outward consequences, of humility and hardship 
and scorn, as all in the day's work, all inherent in the strange 
new venture, but never availing for a moment to warp the 
spirit from its divinely plotted orbit. The truest and strongest 
elements of the human, the seeing eye and the stedfast will, 
are as inherent in it as is the mystic divine. And we, as emu- 
lators of that same self-forgetting faith, are nearer to it when, 
seeing it truly, we just let ourselves go, as it were instinctively, 
on the limitless current of love and faith, regardless of the un- 
toward things we thereby incur, than when we are nervously 
apprehensive about heaven and hell. Every stop that we make 



192 THE LIFE INDEED 

to count our personal chances of ultimate safety or reward is 
essentially a self-limitation; and love and faith will accept no 
limitations. 

We have just considered St. Paul's interpretation of this 
self-emptying of Christ, an interpretation made from a point 
of view the other side of the veil, as if he had been admitted 
into the secret counsel of God. How do you suppose he got 
there? There are many other such interpretations of things 
in Scripture: the whole fabric of what we call revelation is just 
that : men by an amazing presumption taking upon themselves 
to assert what the Spirit of the universe thinks and plans, in 
His vast creative work of evolving a humanity. How do you 
suppose they got the other side of the veil? We are not in 
position to say, it is presumptuous to say, they did not get it 
by an authentic report from the unsee^i places; and of one 
thing we may be sure: they did not get it by psychism and 
occultism in any form; psychism and occultism do not bring 
that kind of news. These are as earth-bound as we are; as 
earth-bound as is any casual, vagrant dead fact; for all the un- 
canny facts it can accumulate, and all the facts that historical 
research can verify and sift, are of the letter that killeth; in 
themselves they are not truth, are not the spirit of life. But 
we do not have to depend on that kind of news; our faith is 
not at the mercy of manuscripts and various readings and 
documents. No: if we have a report from the unseen, Christ 
Himself is that report, Christ the perfected manhood; and the 
way we recognize whether the report is authentic, or as the 
scientific jargon puts it, veridical, is by the spirit within us, 
the highest and purest possession we have. But you say, How 
do we know that supreme report from the unseen except by 
the words that have been written, and how can we tell what 
those words are, except by sifting and keen criticism, by which 
we may separate what actually was said and done by Him 
from what men afterward thought was said and done? Here 
again we are not at the mercy of documents. We have one 
unshakable historic fact: the fact that one Man, in a way that 
showed He had the spirit without measure, dared to make the 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 193 

supreme venture of love and faith, and to work it out in terms 
of the common life. In this fact inheres all the rest, even to 
the end of time. And now, ever since that fact emerged to 
history, the mind of the ages, as I said, has been considering 
the Apostle and High Priest of our profession, Christ Jesus. 
They began to consider Him just as soon as He had lived His 
life; for they knew by a secret instinct that here was a unique, 
a world-filling thing to consider. They were dazed and be- 
wildered at first; naturally; we cannot pass the definitive judg- 
ment on historic events while they are in progress; our 
historians must have time to digest and coordinate and assimi- 
late them. So it was in the scripture age; our Gospels did not 
assume their present shape until years afterward, some think 
nearly two centuries before the last of them was done. But 
what does this show? Merely the inevitable movement of the 
human mind, merely what all literature shows, that — 

the past will always win 

A glory from its being far; 
And orb into the perfect star 
We saw not, when we mov'd therein. 

That is why, in reviewing this record of the Life Indeed, I re- 
ject nothing. It is all a part of that literature which sprang 
out of that one colossal fact; it is the effort of men to get that 
fact into meaning and coordination; as Matthew Arnold ex- 
presses it, it is language thrown out toward an object too large 
to be fully comprehended. And that effort has by no means 
prisoned itself between the lids of our Bible. It is going on 
still; I dare to say that what has made the poetry and phil- 
osophy and fiction of the ages vital, has been in its essence 
just considering Christ, and therefore is making, in ever-mov- 
ing discoveries and concepts, an unending Bible. What matter 
if there are errors of judgment and faults of transmission? 
These may be left to the mending hand of time; they are cor- 
rected best, not by the letter which always has the corruptions 
of a thing that is dead, but by the spirit which giveth life. And 
the spirit sends us back, or rather inward, to that supreme fact, 



194 ^^^^ ^^^^ INDEED 

which being expressed in human life was not at the rude mercy 
of the letter. Jesus wrote nothing; He lived. 

And so the Word had breath, and wrought 

With human hands the creed of creeds 

In loveliness of perfect deeds, 
More strong than all poetic thought. 

I confess to something very like reverence to the great, surg- 
ing, unwieldy, yet desperately earnest body of human litera- 
ture; the voice of their poetic and prophetic spirit always 
making itself heard; I can enter into the feeling that Jesus 
had in the wilderness when to every suggestion of the Tempter 
He responded, "It is written." I think we do ill to limit or 
confine its multifarious utterance, except as we judge it by 
the mighty spirit of life. I have been struck by a remark in 
Sabatier's "Life of St. Francis of Assisi," who of all saints is 
by many deemed to have been most like Christ; the author 
says: "Only a profoundly religious and poetic soul (is not the 
one the other?) can understand." Is not the one the other? 
I ask of the thoughts and images that come to me in literature. 
And when I read a book like Professor Schmidt's recent work 
"The Prophet of Nazareth," and see how he labors to show 
that none of the prophecies meant Christ, and none of the 
types meant Christlike things, and the term Son of man only 
meant this little thing, and the term Son of God must be 
whittled down to this other, — as if it were essential to our 
view of truth that we reduce everything to lowest factual terms 
and sail as it were under bare poles, — I feel that I am asked 
to give up the thought of the ages, the words in which unwit- 
tingly men from the beginning have been helping Christ to 
live. We make nothing by this; we lose unspeakably. The 
world's interpretation of Christ will not bear limitation; it is 
growing all the while. Why, this view of Him in the cosmic 
and evolutionary reference, which men are trying to portray 
in scientific terms, is a product of our very latest time. But 
is it any less likely to be true? For it foots itself squarely on 
this colossal world fact, this supreme historic venture. 

So the world is still recording the meanings of that experi- 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 195 

ment in life; and their record, in spite of mistakes and vagaries 
and aberrations, is like a steady voyage of discovery. The cry 
"Back to Christ" is all very well, as a return for orders to 
headquarters; but it will not do to make it an occasion for 
narrowing or belittling the Christ idea; rather, with the spirit 
of that initial venture in mind, let the watchword be, "Forward, 
ever forward, to the Christ that is to be." For that historic 
venture was only a beginning, an opening of the gates; and 
the end is not yet. 

In a summarizing word we may say: As the lower evolution, 
which has to do with the life of the body, finds its norms and 
types in the species; so this higher and conscious evolution, in 
which the spirit cooperates, and which therefore tends ever 
from the fettered species to the free individual, has developed 
its supreme spiritual type in one Man; who now, as perfected 
personality, embodies the life to which all manhood life is 
organically related, the foundation other than which no man 
can lay; and the love and faith which characterize the com- 
pleted ideal are the vital pulsation in which alone, henceforth, 
manhood achieves its rest, its fulness, its joy. In this Man, 
as He stands unique and towering, it is impossible to say which 
is more evident: His manifoldness of human relation, or His 
utter singleness of motive and aim; His individual remoteness 
from all, or His universal intimateness with all. Is not this 
the mark of the type? It takes away the future tense from 
that verse of Isaiah's, making it present: 

A man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, 

And a covert from the tempest; 

As rivers of water in a dry place, 

As the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. 

But whatever more we recognize in Him, this much we may 
say, in a more pregnant application of Shakespeare's words : — 

His life was gentle; and the elements 

So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up, 

And say to all the world, "This was a man!" 

These words were said, you know, of that noble Roman Bru- 
tus; but Brutus' nobleness was obscured at one point; he got 



196 THE LIFE INDEED 

entangled in a conspiracy^ and yielded part of his soul to evil 
counsel, and went under. This Man trod the wine-press alone, 
and of the people there was none with Him. To be a man: 
that was the quest for the sake of which He laid aside His 
divine claim. Alone He ventured forth; alone He traversed 
the whole consistent, heroic way; alone He passed out of our 
sight. Where would we be, what our way of life, what our 
hope, if at any point He had flinched or failed? The question 
opens for the whole world an alternative too awful to face. 



I. FROM THE EXCEEDING HIGH MOUNTAIN 

His kinsmen, you remember, when they saw how His min- 
istry was going, tried to lay hold on Him, saying, ''He is be- 
side himself"; and many of the Jews, when they listened to 
His interpretations of life, said, ''He hath a devil, and is mad; 
why hear ye him?" Such were among the things He had to 
encounter. It is our business to-day to inquire what method 
there was in His madness ; in other words, whether this strange 
unique life of His was a thing into which He drifted as it were 
by accident, and then found later that He was so committed 
that He could not consistently withdraw, or whether from the 
beginning it obeyed a plan, a foreseen determination, and all 
along bore the fruit that belongs to its kind. Astounding as 
it was to all, not all judged it as madness; to some it openec] 
a dim vision of something transcendently great and beneficent, 
they could hardly divine what. "These are not the words of 
him that hath a devil. Can a devil open the eyes of the blind?" 
Some there were, then, who were trying to pass upon His life 
of the spirit the common-sense judgment of effects, though the 
mystery of the cause stretched far beyond their ken; just as 
He Himself had said to Nicodemus, "The wind bloweth where 
it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not 
tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth; so is everyone that 
is born of the spirit." In Him the great free atmosphere of 
the spirit was stirring in the world, the breath of another and 
higher world; and from the effects of it which they could see, 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 197 

its contact with their lower life, they were gradually, according 
to their fairness and openness of spirit, to judge of its inner 
nature, which they could not see. By their fruits ye shall know 
them. 

But to begin with, we have before us just such a thing as 
we see everyday, just such as everyone of us has by experience 
to meet and solve: namely, a young man, with a young man's 
hopes and energies, setting out upon life and livelihood. To 
Him, as to us, the alternative that rose before Him was capable 
of a very simple reduction: which shall it be, life first and 
livelihood incidental, or livelihood first and life the incident, 
the uncared-for thing? All depended, with Him as with us, 
upon the spirit that animated Him. To make its significance 
more real, let us put beside it Carlyle's account of his young 
contemporary, John Sterling: "Here, then," he says, "is a 
young soul brought to the years of legal majority, furnished 
from his training-schools with such and such shining capa- 
bilities, and ushered on the scene of things, to inquire practi- 
cally, What he will do there? Piety is in the man, noble 
human valor, bright intelligence, ardent proud veracity; light 
and fire, in none of their many senses, wanting for him, but 
abundantly bestowed: a kingly kind of man; — whose 'king- 
dom,' however, in this bewildered place and epoch of the world, 
will probably be difficult to find and conquer ! " You remember 
how, in thus starting his hero forth, Carlyle makes assessment 
of various pursuits and professions: divinity, law, medicine, 
public life; only to find that none quite suited his aptitude, 
except "the anarchic, nomadic, entirely aerial and uncondi- 
tional one, called Literature." He, too, then, like his great 
Prototype, had the controlling bent to be a word to the world, 
to coin his life into expression; and if we had time to follow him 
we should find, as we find universally of men, that the success 
of his impact on the world depended upon the largeness of the 
life and the fulness and beauty of the expression. 

I have chosen this case to set by the side of ours, that we 
might have a kind of unit to measure by. The earthly con- 
ditions, not greatly different, were if anything in Sterling's 



198 THE LIFE INDEED 

favor. He was finely trained and cultured; but he had no 
profession and was casting about for one that would suit his 
temperament. Our Lord already had a means of livelihood, 
the carpenter's trade; but He gave it up, and did not work at 
it any more; it afforded obviously too narrow a vocabulary 
in itself, to fill out the expression of the life that was in Him. 
His giving it up, however, cast no slur on that or any other 
trade; rather it left them all glorified, while he passed beyond 
questions of livelihood to seek first the kingdom of God and 
His righteousness. And here begins His vast differentiation 
from men; so great that it seems almost profane to set any 
other man by the side of Him. Yet it was no differentiation 
that He sought; it all came about rather by His single-minded 
determination, incidents and accidents of life ignored, to in- 
carnate that essential vital principle wherein He could stand 
as a brother by the side of every man. No one had ever made 
this determination before; no one, before or since, even with 
His spirit to help, has made it to such purpose. There is a 
strange universality of appeal and relation to reckon with here ; 
we canot account for it all, nor for the vital part of it, by say- 
ing that in the reign of Tiberius a young carpenter of Galilee 
resolved to be very good and carried out his resolve consist- 
ently. This is about what it amounts to, if we regard Him 
merely as a man among men; even reckoning the wise things 
He said, and the death He died. Rather, somehow His person- 
ality overshadows us as that of the man we would all be, as 
the type of complete manhood which all that is holiest in us 
is struggling to realize. Here is the phenomenon to resolve: 
the fact that this Man's personality is the touchstone of hearts. 
As Napoleon Bonaparte is reported to have said: ''Jesus 
Christ has succeeded in making of every human soul an ap- 
pendage of His own." 

I am led to these remarks by the thought of Professor 
Schmidt's book, "The Prophet of Nazareth." It is one of 
those books of which the coming few years are likely to see 
a considerable crop; for you know Biblical criticism is shift- 
ing its ground now from the Old Testament to the New, and 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 199 

its austere historic method is going to sift the records as they 
have never been sifted before. I tell you this that you may 
not be unprepared when it comes; also to record here my con- 
viction that the historic method itself — as exclusive matter- 
of-fact research I mean — is on its last legs^ and that its sting 
is in its tail. It must give place to something more genial and 
constructive. The book I mention will prove, I think, to be 
one of the ablest of these investigations ; as it certainly is about 
as sweeping and radical as it can be. Here we have about the 
utmost that a rigid, purely factual, unimaginative criticism can 
do. I respect the book, with all its relentless rakings from the 
German workshops, far more than I do these touch-and-go 
books that will soon take occasion from it to scatter fire-brands 
of raw second-hand assertion, or sparks of ad captandum 
superficial reply, saying, 'To here, lo there!" Its object, on 
its factual scale, is to reduce the life of Jesus to lowest his- 
toric terms, to an irreducible minimum; and this by disen- 
gaging from the gospel record all that it deems the fondness of 
disciples, or the looseness of tradition, or the interpretations 
of poetry and theology, have, during the succeeding ages added 
to it. The Gospels, you know, did not reach their present 
shape until many years after the ministry was done ; and books 
like this look upon the intervening years as a sort of run-wild 
garden plot, out of which it is concerned to pull the too luxuri- 
ant growth of weeds. Its excisions are startlingly radical. It 
rejects the fourth Gospel altogether; leaves out virtually all 
that precedes the beginning of the ministry, all that follows 
the crucifixion and burial, and all the miracles except a few 
doubtful cases of mind-cure; and almost totally ignores the 
Epistles of Paul. So the Jesus it would leave us is about what 
a man in the street, with a head for nothing but sense-per- 
ception, would see from the outside, and would report as men 
report a street-fight, saying just this and that, without any 
varnish or frills, is what occurred. And the writer apparently 
takes comfort in the thought that he has got down to literal 
bed-rock; which in his view is, that Jesus neither professed to 
be, nor was, anything more than a wise and well-disposed 



200 THE LIFE INDEED 

prophet, whose life was remarkably sincere, and whose views 
of life were so astonishingly correct, even by our present com- 
plex standards, that they are worthy of a fuller confidence and 
application than civilization or the churches have ever ac- 
corded to them. All this Jesus certainly was; we can go with 
the writer so far, and still have the richest legacy of the ages. 
But I confess I am suspicious of every man and every method 
that sets up an arbitrary limit and says ''Nothing but.'^ And 
when I see that ''nothing but" applied to the life of Christ — 
when I measure it up and ask "Is that all?" — forthwith there 
rise to my thought many vital elements of being, many strands 
of life even in my poor ideal, to which this frigid criticism is 
blind. It is not on the Christ scale; not even on the scale of 
inner creative history; but only that of newspaper journalism 
and courts of law. All that makes the life of Christ perennial, 
a present power and pulsation, has evaporated; leaving only 
a few stray annals of ancient story, and a few precepts to 
learn by rote. 

Now I am not concerned to refute this book, or to warn 
against the danger of it. That is why I am so free to call at- 
tention to it. If it has found the irreducible minimum of fact, 
let us be glad; for there is no danger in authentic fact. The 
Bible itself invites the scrutiny of facts; we have not followed 
cunningly devised fables. But there are facts and facts; and 
on top of all this external history there is this larger fact to 
be reckoned with, that from Jesus' day to this the world has 
not been able to look at His life cold-bloodedly. That life lays 
hold on men; it enkindles their hearts, gives them peace and 
joy and energy and a sense of solved existence, — why? Then 
forthwith there spring up all around it, like a springtide luxuri- 
ance, art and poetry and vitalized thinking, — why? Then 
we become aware of a vast new movement of the spirit of man, 
all tracing back directly to that life, as to a mighty seminal 
impulse and power, — why? A mere villager who has left his 
carpenter's bench to become a self-made prophet has no busi- 
ness, it would seem, to figure like that in history; if he has, 
and if this paltry fact accounts for him, what has become of 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 201 

all the prophets who have done similar things? This is a world 
of law; and like causes ought to produce like effects every- 
where. And if Jesus so figures in history not by virtue of what 
He was and did but by virtue of the halo with which others 
have invested Him, how resolve the halo? Did it take other 
minds, then, to piece His out and make a Christ of Him? And 
if so, where do we find the real Christ nucleus, in a.d. 30 or 
some vague time in the second century? If we must throw 
away the Gospel of John in order to get the authentic Jesus, 
I submit the serious question rises whether it wouldn't be 
better to throw away the history-shorn Jesus and keep the 
Gospel of John. For somehow a Christ, the recognized 
summit of manhood — not a mere carpenter-itinerant — has 
out of the nebula of history orbed into concrete being, and be- 
come the greatest theme of literature and life. Did that Christ 
live, with the supreme manhood in Him from the first, or did 
a company of poets and fictionists create Him out of a Jew? 
If the latter, then must we dismiss Jesus and put our faith in 
poetry and fiction? We might do worse. I am not sure but 
we would do worse, by cramping our faith down to the sight 
of the eyes, to a casual fact seen only from the outside. There 
is in these more of the spirit which giveth life than there is in 
a congealed external letter which killeth. And if we insist on 
reporting this majestic Christ phenomenon as one would a 
street-fight, we abjure all our heritage in the loving, creative, 
assimilative mind of the ages which forthwith made all the 
Christ events its own, and quickened its holiest ideals by them, 
seeing in them not only the fact but the eternal truth without 
which facts are nugatory. 

I seem here to have made a long digression; but by the 
scale on which we are thinking I have not. For it all belongs 
to the answer we must needs give here to the question which 
our Lord himself put, "What think ye of Christ? Whose son 
is he?" This, in scripture terminology, is really the crux of 
our inquiry. Our foregoing investigation, following the higher 
evolution of spirit up to the law of the spirit of life, with its 
supreme instinct of love and faith^ has brought us up to the 



202 THE LIFE INDEED 

point where this answer is the next thing in order. Shall it 
be a petty answer, from the outside, or shall it, from the inside, 
be large and roomy? In other words, it is time now to pro- 
ject our view of Jesus of Nazareth on the background of the 
ideal of life which somehow a long line of manhood striving 
has evolved. Does He stand the test, or look we for another? 
He Himself puts the question, offering Himself thus as a candi- 
date, whom we, according to our insight, are free to take or 
leave. Nothing could be fairer or more above board. He calls 
himself the Son of man; He arrogates nothing higher, and even 
this term He uses in a theoretical way, not as a personal title, 
but as a means of defining what, in this case and that, the Son 
of man would naturally be and do. Thus by His very use of 
the term He is demonstrating, point by point. His conception 
of manhood life and character. Men ask Him in bewilder- 
ment, ''Who is this Son of man?" and He only refers them to 
the light that is with them, by which they may judge for them- 
selves, and ought to make up their minds in the little while 
that the light is with them. Some ardent souls like Nathanael 
carry their insight further, and say, "Thou art the Son of God; 
thou art the King of Israel"; but this is not His assumption, 
it is their inner recognition; they come to see that He answers 
their conception of what the Son of God would be like. Once 
indeed He is reported to have asked a man whose eyes He has 
opened, "Dost thou believe on the Son of God?" and when 
the man asked, "Who is he. Lord, that I might believe on 
him?" He answered, "Thou hast both seen him, and it is he 
that talketh with thee." But this is not an arrogation; it is 
a revelation to one whose opened eyes and heart are ready for 
it, one who has become like Nathanael. 

The Son of man, the Son of God, — what shall we make ot 
these terms? Professor Schmidt juggles with them; puts them 
through the philological mill by translating them back into 
Aramaic, the presumed language that Christ spoke; discovers 
that in this and cognate languages the word son means virtu- 
ally one of a species. That is all right; a higher critic's mind 
is built that way. The Son of man, then, becomes a specimen, 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 203 

one of a species, a specimen man; and the Son of God is, — 
why, is a specimen God, as if there were a divine species for 
Him to represent; this latter definition having to be fortified by 
heathen usage, in order to make up gods enough to furnish an 
average specimen. But his main contention, after all this jug- 
gling, is that when Jesus says Son of man He means simply 
a man; and Professor Schmidt's rather lame conclusion is that 
Jesus never said it at all, but some later marplot said it for 
Him. Well, we won't quarrel with his philology; his conclu- 
sion, it is evident, is of a piece with his prevailing desire to 
make Christ as little as possible, so that the average man, con- 
tinuing to be an undifferentiated specimen, can grasp Him. 
But when we see, as we see on every gospel page, what Jesus 
conceives the Son of man should be and do, we can hardly 
think He has the average man, the mere specimen, in mind; 
for certainly the race in general had not averaged up, when 
He spoke, to being Lord of the sabbath and forgiving sins and 
rising from the dead. Rather He is describing the ideal man, 
what man, as his evolution dictates, has it in him to be; and 
in His own person He is working out the elements of that ideal 
before men's eyes. Not the specimen, but rather, so to say, 
the whole species stands before us individualized, and con- 
scious of closing in itself the ultimate manhood type and value. 
This from our scientific point of view is reasonable and feas- 
ible; for our evolution course has all along been working 
steadily toward the perfected individual, of the species yet 
more than a specimen, a prophecy, rather, of what shall be 
in the ages to come. If human evolution begins with the im- 
pulse of the unlimited spirit, it seems as if it must in course of 
time evolve the Christ, the Son of man and the Son of God 
in one, as soon as it reaches the point where it has the spirit 
without measure. In this sense we need not be afraid to say 
Christ is a product of evolution; for the cosmic energy, which 
is love, must do so much, with all the self -emptying and sacri- 
fice involved therein, for pure love's sake. How could love 
reach its full expression otherwise? How could it stop one 
step short of this? 



204 THE LIFE INDEED 

Now the discovery of all this might conceivably have been 
left to the scientific mind of the twentieth century to put into 
word and definition, according to its current notions of biol- 
ogy; in which case man would be at the mercy of the scientific 
vocabulary, and evolution would be a thing for scholars and 
philosophers. But this concerns every unlettered man; every 
man who knows what it is to be a father and a son has a vital 
individual interest in it. How then shall he find it out, in the 
language in which he was born? What way so natural, so 
reasonable, so universally adequate, after all, as for the Spirit 
of the universe, the Father of spirits, to announce, ^'This is 
my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased," and for the su- 
preme Personality, once evolved, to say and show to men what 
the Son of man, the Man of men, should be and do? This 
is precisely what the Scripture says took place, and this has 
ever since been recognized as an authentic revelation from the 
unseen source whence the power and spirit of it proceeds. How 
the announcement got into words, and when, is by comparison 
a paltry matter; we have the revelation, and the great heart 
of mankind, and, I think, the large reason of evolutionary 
science, set to their seal that it is true. Evolution has become 
a matter not of bondage and blindness but of sonship ; and the 
terms Son of God and Son of man are doing the best work that 
it is in words to do. 

Now when this Personality, whose double witness that He 
is Son of man and Son of God constitutes Him the supreme 
Personality, sets forth on human life, how shall He behave? 
What shall He assume that He is ; in the way of love and faith 
I mean, — in such a way that not only shall men recognize 
Him as He is, but what is of paramount importance, that they 
shall commit themselves, in the same love and faith, to that 
spirit and current of life? It is a great evolutionary problem, 
which not science alone but the universal mind of man is called 
to solve. Is it not a crowning mercy that one mind solved it, 
instead of leaving the matter floating through the ages for a 
scientific syndicate of minds to solve? 

So here we are brought back to the young Galilean Jesus 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 205 

setting forth, as did John Sterling, on life, but on a life how 
much greater. If He has not solved the problem, no one has. 
Shall He solve it consciously alone, or shall He make equal 
connection with the Father of spirits who is witnessing with 
Him? In other words, shall He be an agnostic, as so many 
thinkers are now, or shall He live and act as if He knew the 
source of His life? Here is what the agnostics are saying: I 
quote from a book entitled "A Modern Symposium": ''Man 
is in the making; but henceforth he must make himself. To 
that point Nature has led him, out of the primeval slime. She 
has given him limbs, she has given him brain, she has given 
him the rudiment of a soul. Now it is for him to make or mar 
that splendid torso. Let him look no more to her for aid; for 
it is her will to create one who has the power to create himself. 
If he fail, she fails; back goes the metal to the pot; and the 
great process begins anew. If he succeeds, he succeeds alone. 
His fate is in his own hands." In this programme of life man 
not only bids farewell to nature, which is all that God has 
ever meant to him, but regards himself as a splendid torso, 
with the rudiment of a soul, which he is to complete without 
any pattern to work by, except what is furnished by his own 
wisdom and will. All this is in polar contrast to our young 
Galilean, for whom nature means father and God, whose soul 
is no rudiment but completed through the vital upbuilding of 
love and faith, and who from a living soul is setting forth to be 
a life-giving spirit. All the agnostic seems to think of is self- 
building; the manhood he would create is a hard, self-reliant, 
self-regarding manhood, in all the pride of his intrinsic great- 
ness. The Galilean hardly seems to think of Himself at all; 
He is not here to please Himself ; and this gives an attractive, 
sympathetic tone to all the record of Him. It is an infinite 
relief to turn from the cold self-sufficiency of the words 
we have just read to the more winsome idiom of the gospel 
narrative. 

Imagine what would be the effect upon an ardent-minded, 
true-hearted young man, if there should come pressing into 
his consciousness, as from some far-withdrawn inner depth, 



2o6 THE LIFE INDEED 

the assurance, ''Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well 
pleased." This, you know, is what is reported to have hap- 
pened to Jesus at the Jordan. Along with this assurance, as 
the same report relates. He saw the heavens opened, and the 
Spirit came upon Him in the bodily shape of a dove. Whether 
this was the first time such consciousness of His significance 
in the world had been with Him is not quite clear; most likely 
it was, like a great awakening from dreams and desires that 
had been beautiful and true, but more or less undefined. At 
any rate, we know that from the beginning He had had the 
bent, the appetency; at twelve years of age, He was impatient 
to be about His Father's business, and thereafter, until this 
scene at the Jordan, His wisdom and His favor with God and 
man increased with His stature and age. The germs of the 
matter were always in Him, just as the child is the father of 
the man; but this is different from coming, as from a long 
orphanage, to know how great His paternity was, and to be 
confronted with the question what to do about it, how to main- 
tain the family likeness and tradition, how to be true to this 
tremendous noblesse oblige. All men have it obscurely in them 
to be sons of God; but to be the beloved Son, the first-born 
of many brethren, and therefore to make the will and nature 
of the Father palpable, and to give to as many as received 
Him power themselves to become sons of God, — was not this 
the greatest task, and the greatest glory, ever laid upon a son 
of man? 

That He took that majestic trust with full appreciation of 
its huge involvements, is evident from the next thing that oc- 
curred. That sweet spirit, so accordant with the angel's 
earlier song of peace, goodwill to men, proved at first to be 
anything but dove-like in Him; it led Him, or as St. Mark 
says, it drove Him, to the wilderness, where a spirit of very 
different sort awaited Him, where, we may say, two spirits of 
a diverse impulse were fighting to obtain possession of His 
life, and where He, from the wisdom and fibre that was in Him, 
was to make the momentous decision. Will the manhood 
which the ages have evolved and concentrated in this person- 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 207 

ality stand the stress, will it define in truest manhood terms 
what it is to be Son of God, so that henceforth the felt spirit 
of the Father of spirits shall flow consciously and wisely 
through the deeds of men? It is a breathless moment of his- 
tory, this forty day struggle in the wilderness. For Satan's 
wisdom and methods, which whether true or not are mighty, 
have hitherto usurped the spiritual field, and if they are dis- 
lodged must give place to something yet to be tried, yet prob- 
lematical and experimental. I have spoken of Christ's life as 
the most colossal scientific experiment that was ever made. 
Well, here in the wilderness it begins: He must determine by 
what apparatus, what procedure, what behavior in all the de- 
tails of life, He shall make it. Hitherto men have been the 
slaves of nature, of expediency, of custom, of law; but all this, 
in the view we have been taking, was an obligation of their in- 
fancy and childhood, as they came up from the animal to the 
spiritual; so their bondage has been, after all, to God, who has 
evolved their lower nature as well as their higher; and this 
other spirit, now recognized as so malign and destructive, is 
virtually raising the question, not whether these lower wis- 
doms and methods shall cease from man, but whether they 
shall be on top, shall control his action as if they were his 
highest self-expression. It is a question, at bottom, of the 
all-directing current of spirit, the tide of manhood, whether, 
as a felt pulsation of God, it shall be inward toward self, or 
outward toward the vitalizing and uplifting of the v/orld. 

I cannot stay to dwell long on the stages of this temptation 
in the wilderness ; full enough though they be, each one, for a 
whole season's study. You will note how accurately adapted 
to the situation every temptation is: how the lower spirit says 
every time, ''If thou be the Son of God," do this, make the 
fact evident in this way; you will note too how every time the 
answer is, not God's son should assert Himself so and so, but 
man shall not live by bread alone, shall not tempt God, shall 
worship none other than the very highest and holiest that he 
feels God to be. Christ is here to express God in terms of the 
human; and so alone can He express the human in terms of 



208 THE LIFE INDEED 

God. But if it is this latter that He will express, it shall be 
the human as it is at the fulness of the time, when the current 
of love and faith is ready to have free course; not as it was 
in the groping, twilight, childish times, when men were gov- 
erned by environment and expediency. We can see from this 
how wisely and truly Christ always expressed Himself when 
He set forth what the Son of man, man in His idea, should be 
and do. 

The first temptation, beginning on the lowest and most ob- 
vious plane, is as rampant now, the world over, as it was here 
in the wilderness. Man, feed yourself; use your opportunity 
to get the comforts, the bodily supports, the gratifications of 
your body; see what a chance you have; if you are the son 
of the creative power of the universe the very stones may at 
your word be your bread. Well, we know what marvelous in- 
ventive skill man can put forth to make this assertion true; 
there seems to be no end to his power to take the resources of 
nature and turn them to his purpose; and how predominantly, 
in the spheres both of labor and luxury, it seems to reduce it- 
self to getting enough to eat. How much of civilization fo- 
cusses in this. Here is how a recent book puts it: 'Tor, as 
we read history, the economic factor determines all the others. 
^Man ist, was er isst/ as the German said; and morals, art, 
religion, all the so-called 'ideal activities,' are just allotropic 
forms of bread and meat." The man who wrote this has heard 
Satan's temptation and answered it the other way; he too rep- 
resents himself as trying to uplift the race, his panacea for 
their ills being a socialistic scheme; and what he wants to do 
is to give everybody enough to eat, so as to build up their 
tissues into healthy, happy physical men, from which, as he 
thinks, the sound mind in a sound body will follow by natural 
consequence. What an opportunity for Christ, — to steer men 
to their God-sonship through the tissues of the body! But 
no! man's spirit is set in a better way; his true life comes 
through the words of God, and when these are his meat and 
drink, as they always were to Christ, the wants of the body 
will be cared for as an incidental thing. When later He said. 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 209 

'What man of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him 
a stone?'' was He not thinking of His own hunger in the wil- 
derness, and from His own experience putting it upon men to 
take the God part, not the man's, and to be sons of God by 
giving the best wheaten bread, and the best that is in them 
every way, rather than the animal part, by going through life 
an embodied hunger and craving? And when He fed the five 
thousand, was not every word that through his filial lips pro- 
ceeded out of the mouth of God so much greater food to their 
souls that the five loaves and two small fishes were an object 
lesson of how easily, with God's words to supplement, the body 
could respond to the fulness of the spirit? Truly, these wil- 
derness lessons became a very vital reality in the ministry that 
succeeded. 

The second temptation takes another ground, I was going 
to say, higher; but I am not so sure. It is as extreme on the 
mystic side of life, as was the first on the animal. Man, if you 
are the son of God, use the fact to reveal God's secret and 
astounding working; you can show He is in you by making 
exceptions to the laws of nature, and by a wonderful feat of 
levitation actually put Him at His word, and showing a gaping, 
wondering world that when He promised to bear men up by 
angels He meant what He said. This temptation, you see, was 
a hoary old thing; its principle came down from the time when 
the serpent in Eden had said, God said you would die. Try 
it once, ye shall not surely die; put Him at His word and see 
how false it is; or as here put Him at His word and demon- 
strate how true it is. This opens the whole sphere of the mar- 
velous, the occult, the exceptional, in a word, of the things 
wherein especially gifted souls may separate their life from the 
general ongoings of humanity. We know what has come of 
this in history: the unhealthy effort to make men trust in 
powers exerted for them and not in them, powers available 
only to the skilled and initiated, and exhibited as a holy show 
and not as a universal and practical vitalization of character. 
If Jesus had yielded to this He would have committed Himself 
to going through life as a kind of fakir, astonishing men by 



2IO THE LIFE INDEED 

occult feats, or perhaps as a sort ot Indian yogi, sitting apart 
from men and playing the role of an inaccessible, withdrawn 
sanctity and wisdom which can only be looked at. You see 
the polar opposite of this temptation to all the whole- 
some bent and spirit of Jesus. No: not tempting God by put- 
ting the word on which you feed to a doubtful test, as if He 
were some cosmic spirit mystic and only exceptionally mani- 
festable; but taking your common life, in love and faith, down 
from the pinnacle to the needy hearts of men, and making it 
their universal resource and working tool. Put all that is 
mystic and holy in you to the homely and practical issues of 
life; so only shall you prove yourself Son of God, in terms of 
believing, energizing, life-giving manhood, the perfect son of 
man. 

If Jesus had succumbed to this second temptation, which 
I am disposed to regard as the subtlest and in the end the dead- 
liest of the three, the game would have been up. It would 
have amounted to expatriation from the spirit of the whole 
family in heaven and earth, the Spirit of God and the spirit 
of man alike. For while, on the God side, it would have seemed 
in the innocence of exaggerated trust, to be leaping into the 
arms of the divine, by emphasizing this at the expense of the 
human, in naive contrast to the first and third temptations, 
which emphasized the human at the expense of the divine, in 
reality it would have been blind committal to the God power 
at the expense of the God love, which latter is the central God 
essence. Or to put it in another way, it would have been using 
God's freely proffered love, making traffic of it as it were, 
without the spontaneous interchange of love in return; for it 
would have been detachment from the God-spirit and transfer 
to the attitude of the doubter and tempter, who instead of 
moving freely in the love current tries freakish experiments 
on the very life in which he lives. But this is not the worst 
of it. On the man side it would have made the Christ inac- 
cessible, by making His manhood not a universal uplift but a 
clever, magical performance, a thing to be looked at, not emu- 
lated. How easily this temptation may steal upon us all! 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 211 

The thing can be done by the popular orator, by the brilliant 
scholar, by the talented business man, by the unscrupulous 
millionaire; by any means, in fact, whereby a man occupies 
a plane of privilege or cleverness from which he is merely a 
detached spectator or exploiter of the great common life below. 
Consider, then, what resistance to this subtle temptation 
means. This straight-seeing carpenter, filled with the Holy 
Spirit, not partly filled, is bent, according to his insight, on 
making the will of His Father prevail. And here comes in 
His wholly new reading of that will. You remember how 
cleverly Matthew Arnold phrases this ideal of His ; so cleverly 
that we do not at first recognize how fatally he limits it. 
Matthew Arnold says that the supreme Christian ideal is to 
make reason and the will of God prevail. Reason? Why, 
that is the ideal of the Greek philosophers; if they had their 
way, perfect reason — justice and temperance and all the self- 
contained, self-restraining virtues, — would prevail, and the 
world would still be congealed in heathenism and triumphant 
law. Jesus' ideal is, rather, to make the unreasonable virtues 
and the will of God prevail; for in His reading God is identi- 
fied with the unreasonable virtues, the virtues of grace; is 
identified with love and faith and the hope for mankind that 
springs out of these. These, you will recall, are the new in- 
vention of Christianity. And what hope, what surge out of 
the deadly restriction and self-bondage of the present heathen 
and legal dispensation, except by a grand venture and abandon 
on the new ocean of love and faith? It is just to this new 
ideal that Jesus' resistance to this second temptation commits 
Him, commits Him and confirms Him in it. 

To leave the Christ inaccessible, to emphasize the god, is, 
however, alluring and self-pleasing, to leave the rank and file 
down there at the foot of the pinnacle where it was before. 
The heathen and the legalists already know what it is to em- 
phasize the god; they have described it and prophesied it; it 
is no new revelation. Jesus defines it in human terms; but it 
is by turning their ideas face about. ^'You are making Him 
more supernatural all the while," says one of my friends. 



212 THE LIFE INDEED 

But I am not trying to; it is He that is doing it; in 
spite of all my efforts to hold Him back He keeps getting be- 
yond me and beyond the old humanity. He is doing it just 
by not emphasizing the god; and as Browning puts it, so when 
we bethink ourselves we say, 

Such ever was love's way: to rise, it stoops. 

In other words, in all His transcendency He is emphasizing 
the god by making man, with whom He has thoroughly identi- 
fied Himself, more supernatural; is emphasizing the god by 
launching Himself on the divine, unreasoning tide of love, and 
inspiring men to commit themselves to the same. So He makes 
the Christ accessible by coming down from the pinnacle to the 
broad plane of help, — that is His answer. There are two 
ways to get your ideals into the hearts of men ; and they show 
themselves in the simplest matters, as simple as the writing of 
a paragraph. One is to make everything so plain and easy 
that they can understand without putting forth effort; very 
desirable this, but there is the risk that they will hold cheap 
what they get so cheaply, and so just look on and let the writer 
do all the thinking. The other is, while putting before men 
a hard thought or ideal, to stimulate them to do enough more, 
in cerebration or in spiritual response, to appropriate it. There 
cannot be much question which alternative is the more valu- 
able. We have Jesus' way before us. The divine is here, ex- 
pressed in your own terms. Rise now to meet Him. You can 
if you will drink of His cup and be baptized with His bap- 
tism. To do more, to take of the energy of love and do un- 
reasonable things will then be easy, nay, the natural way of 
living. 

The third temptation, not now on the solitary pinnacle but 
on the exceeding high mountain whence are visible all the king- 
doms of the world, enters that sphere of practical action with 
which Jesus must needs reckon; for if He is Son of God, He 
is obviously the one to bring about that kingdom of heaven 
which John has preached, which the prophets have prophesied, 
and which He Himself has supremely at heart. ''Behold, a king 



TEE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 213 

shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judg- 
ment,'^ the old-time seers had said; here now was the grand 
opportunity. If you think this opened a dream too vast for 
the young Galilean to cherish, consider what possibilities must 
have risen, to the mind of one who had received assurance that 
He was the beloved Son of God, and who afterward, in the 
very pursuance of His lowly mission had to escape to a moun- 
tain to evade those who would make Him king by force. To 
set up the kingdom of heaven, with a Prince of the blood, as 
it were, upon the throne; what thoughts of ways and means, 
ideals and principles, must have inhered in the conviction that 
He was the chosen One to do it. John had just been depicting 
that kingdom in austere hues, with the stern alternative of 
fire and the axe as penalty of the rejection of it. Men had 
always hitherto been driven into kingdoms, that is into sub- 
jection; the one dominating idea was that it was the business 
of the rank and file to be governed, not to govern themselves. 
Men would not come to subjection of their own motion; they 
were proverbially stiff-necked and rebellious, the best of them. 
Therefore drive them; force them; raise your sceptre and put 
them in the forms of government, if not the heart. Then you 
could bend them to your will, as it were in detail. I stood 
once on a hill in Germany, Hohen-Syburg, where was an old 
pool or spring, in which the tradition says the Saxon Duke 
Wittekind, with all his people, was forced by Charlemagne 
from heathenism into Christianity by the simple method of 
compulsory baptism. What other plan of empire so time- 
honored and compendious? But no: that was Satan's way, the 
external, the way of war and tyranny; that was giving the 
worship — the worth-ship — to the adversary method, as had 
always been done. The temptation had only to be raised to 
be summarily rejected; there is a trenchancy about the an- 
swer which seems to betoken that the mists and glamours of 
things were at last cleared away, and the baseness of the whole 
proposal stood forth in its naked ugliness. Worship God: as- 
cribe the worth-ship to the God you have come to see, and 
the spirit with which your life is filled, — that is the answer. 



214 THE LIFE INDEED 

Whatever sovereignty comes from that comes by the way of 
service to that all-controlling ideal. 

Such committal to kingliness as this sheathes the sword, and 
in lieu of it opens the way of repentance and humility. 

Repentance — have you considered what this is? It be- 
longs to the new idiom of things that is coming in; it is the 
all-men's means of entrance into the kingdom. John had intro- 
duced the word; but he was still of the old order, and to him 
it meant mainly what men should repent jrom; and it came to 
many who did not feel the need of repenting from anything, 
being already candidates for the kingdom, as children of Abra- 
ham. What need for them to change their minds jrom some- 
thing, or bother about their spiritual attitude at all, so long as 
all the kingdom they had minds for was already theirs by 
right of birth? But Jesus, who came down from the moun- 
tain to preach the same duty of repentance, had supremely in 
mind what men were to repent to. For it was no longer a 
question of being children of Abraham, and ruling the earth; 
it was their marvelous opportunity of becoming children of 
God. ^'The kingdom of heaven is at hand," He said; change 
your minds, then, throw open the doors of your spirit, to get 
ready for it, and welcome it as it is. It is a new thing; you 
cannot enter by the old ways. It is a new life, for every man 
that comes in; there is no antagonism of ruler and subject 
here, nor any pride of birth or office-holding. It is a kingdom 
where all are made kings, and priests of a higher king; and 
this by simply opening their hearts to receive the kingliness 
into themselves. This is a new definition of repentance. The 
old world was crowding the idea out of its scheme; was taking 
pride in a heart fixed and changeless ; nay, its law was making 
it feel that a man once established thereunder could not change 
himself, and need not. The same idea pervades our scientific 
thinking, which will hold a man prisoner to his environment 
and heredity. It is almost an axiom of science and common 
sentiment that as a man is, so he must remain, that it is not 
really in him to change his heart and mind. 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 215 

The world will not believe a man repents: 
And this wise world of ours is mainly right. 
Full seldom doth a man repent, or use 
Both grace and will to pick the vicious quitch 
Of blood and custom wholly out of him, 
And make all clean, and plant himself afresh. 

So a wise poet has made King Arthur say. But this Galilean 
king committed his procedure to the idea that a man can 
change; that the mind and heart of man are not of necessity 
hard and rigid but flexible, capable always of being opened 
and expanded to the largest growth and nobleness. I have the 
idea that repentance is not a momentary thing but permanent; 
its other name is readiness, to rise out of hardness into love, to 
commit itself to a more generous effort of faith. 

We needs must love the highest when we see it, 
Not Lancelot, nor another, 

said once a guilty queen, waking late to the high possibilities 
of her life. And such an ability as this is what Jesus took for 
granted, in His sublime faith in human nature. Everyone can; 
there is something in him that can; when the door is open he 
can enter; for when man is evolved to the point of adultness 
he is not a rigid and unchanging thing, like a higher au- 
tomaton; he is for the first time free and adaptable. There- 
fore our Lord's first business, when He comes down from the 
mountain to announce His kingdom, is, to treat men so. Do 
you see what a new stimulus to development this brings to the 
sons of men? It takes the race of man, at the deadlock to 
which the empire of law and reason is conducting it, and virtu- 
ally says. You can overcome this deadly inertia; you can vi- 
brate responsive to these higher things; you can stretch out 
your withered hand and open your withered heart, if you will; 
for there is enough in your own higher nature, so capable of 
love and faith, to be your support and strength, if you will but 
exert it. This, to my mind, is what is involved in repentance. 
The command to it, in Christ's royal reading of the term, is 
His divine expression of His limitless faith in human nature. 

But when He came down from the exceeding high moun- 
tain. He came with this assurance still in His mind, that He 



2i6 THE LIFE INDEED 

was the beloved, the unique Son of God; He was not to make 
His way and build His kingdom by ceasing in any whit to be 
that. He was simply transferring the same ideals, the same 
consciousness of life-values, to another field, or rather to the 
universal field. He had rejected Satan's way, and in His 
mighty experiment was taking God's way. But how shall the 
Son of God, thus moving among men, look? How shall He 
comport Himself? Jesus was not without prophecy to guide 
Him and lay down His programme; that very announcement 
of His sonship at the Jordan was a quotation from the second 
Psalm, which may have come to Him at once through the 
channels of His own memory and out of the ethereal realm 
about Him. And that Psalm lays down a programme for the 
Son of God, as the ideal existed when the Jews had earthly 
kings and kingdoms to pattern from. You remember how 
crude that early ideal is: it represents God as sitting in the 
heavens and laughing in derision at earthly kings and their 
futile oppositions, and the Son of God as a capricious Being 
who must be propitiated and conciliated lest He be angry and 
kill them; and all this in support of the conception that He 
is to make His enemies His footstool. That ideal, made ven- 
erable by age and classic song, still held the ground when 
Christ came; it was at the basis of Satan's temptation, and so 
had wrought its work in Jesus' own mind. It must be reckoned 
with; and He must take such a course with men as either to 
confirm it or dislodge men from it. It may be too there were 
elements of truth in it, a larger truth, it may be eternally true 
that the Son of God is destined to reign until He has put all 
enemies under His feet. But in what sense is this to be true? 
He must take the way that shall disengage the purer sense 
from the cruder, and preserve the truth for higher uses. The 
old seers and psalmists had a real vision of the great things to 
be; but in their foreshortened notions, which were just like 
ours, they seized the kingship and its results while their eyes 
were still holden from the real kingliness. What is real king- 
liness, the kingliness that is patterned after the King of kings? 
Is he a real king, who sits arrayed in splendor, and walks in 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 217 

luxury, while under his sway are gnashing teeth and turbulent 
rebellious hearts, and while all around him are rags and squalor 
and the sigh of the oppressed? Shall the king keep his iron 
foot on these, or shall he be a beneficent influence, like the God 
whom he represents, to relieve, to uplift, to help men bear the 
burdens of existence? The true kingliness wins, not subdues; 
or rather, it subdues by winning. A story is told of an old- 
time Oriental monarch, who on coming to his throne in a time 
of revolts and wide-spread disloyalties, boasted that he would 
slay all his enemies, and when later, in the era of prosperity 
and good-will that he inaugurated, these very rebellious ones 
came to do him enthusiastic homage, was reminded of his 
boast. "But are the enemies not slain?" he replied; ''They are 
no longer enemies, for in my reign of kindness and wisdom 
and peace their enmity is dead." Here was the real kingliness, 
a kingliness that created, not destroyed; that gave the sterling 
allegiance of his subjects a chance to be, not crushed and out- 
raged. And that, in Jesus' view, is the kingliness of the Son 
of God, to which His programme of life must be adjusted. It 
is His reading of life, as it has emerged from the searching 
fire of temptation and shaped itself into the duty of the Son 
of man. 

Here comes in that other virtue of which I spoke, the virtue 
of humility; a phase of the new pulsation of life which we have 
not yet considered. I quoted, you remember, Mr. Chesterton's 
remark that while Christianity had taken and naturalized all 
the pagan virtues, it had invented three absolutely new ones, 
faith, hope, and charity, and that these, as distinguished from 
the dictates of reason and common sense, were the absolutely 
unreasonable virtues. But to this list he later added this 
fourth virtue of humility, saying that this also was new inven- 
tion of Christianity, and that the hope of the world depended 
on it, as on the others, for its deliverance from deadlock and 
its progress to higher things. Humility — what is this? It 
is not a self-pleasing thing; we would all much rather be proud 
than humble, and if we haven't anything to be proud of, too 
many of us try to make up the lack by being vain. But the 



21 8 THE LIFE INDEED 

fact that humility is not self-pleasing is just what saves it and 
makes it a new power of life. Humility is no more self-abase- 
ment than it is self-aggrandizement; rather, it is the adjust- 
ment of our spirit to life as it is, large or lowly, and as we 
essentially are, without reference to self at all. It is in fact 
just what comes into life from the elimination of the self- 
element. Think of that, and you will realize how it makes 
things fall into their real and related place. When self is 
eliminated, for the first time life and the world are seen and 
treated as they truly are, without the obscuring glamours of 
self-interest or pride, and without the twist of jealous preju- 
dice, to distort the view. For the first time, then, Sophocles' 
ideal is truly realized, ''to see life steadily and see it whole"; 
it is only the humble man who can do that. This helps us to 
understand why Jesus saw so much more in manhood than 
had ever been seen before; and why, in spite of all the dis- 
counts that he must make for sin and depravity — and how 
great these were He, who needed not that any should testify 
of man, for He knew what was in man. He was well aware — 
yet He trusted Himself whole-souled to the deeper human na- 
ture, in order that by the power of such trust the good that 
was possible in it might some day become real. To the un- 
regenerate heart this humility looks like a weakling virtue. It 
looks like knuckling under, or at best like an enthusiastic 
Quixotism, treating men as they are not. Well, it is, but it 
is none the less the hope of the world. It is just the practical 
attitude that this supreme historic venture takes; the huge 
experiment in life which aims to awaken an answering life. 
When it is carried far enough to turn the other cheek to the 
smiter, yielding, as it looks, it is at least strong enough to re- 
main steadfastly the same in spite of evil provocation and con- 
tempt. And when the same lowly virtue goes steadily and 
faithfully on to death and the cross, its real strength becomes 
manifest; it is the manliest, mightiest virtue in life, so trans- 
cendently great that Jesus' death, with the staunch humility 
of faith that led to it, has been laid hold of as the one concrete 
^vent that redeems the world, 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 219 

How easily we deceive ourselves about the values of life, 
until we get down to the eternal principles of things. Here is 
a man who, making no adventitious claims for self, calmly en- 
dures contempt, ridicule, torture, death, His self-reverence and 
self-control being all the while intact and prevailing; while all 
round Him are men who, in their nervous dread lest their self- 
dignity should be invaded, bolster it up with scorn and great 
swelling words, and would if the stress came run away from 
a cow. And here we see how truly humility is a new thing in 
the earth, a Christ invention. The ancient and modern pagan- 
ism makes the supreme quest of life happiness; the happiness 
of a proud, prevailing egoism. And it gets happiness; it is the 
law^ of our being that we get what we supremely want. Mr. 
Chesterton speaks of "the absurd shallowness of those who 
imagine that the pagan enjoyed himself only in a materialistic 
sense. Of course, he enjoyed himself, not only intellectually 
even, he enjoyed himself morally, he enjoyed himself spiritu- 
ally. But it was himself that he was enjoying; on the face of 
it, a very natural thing to do." It was the reasonable quest 
of heathenism; eminently reasonable; we see its result in the 
Pharisee, who was really nothing but a Jewish pagan, as he 
stands hugging himself in proud delight, and thanks God that 
he is not as other men are. But, as Mr. Chesterton, in his 
contention that humility is a newly invented and essentially 
unreasonable virtue, goes on to say: "The psychological dis- 
covery is merely this, that whereas it had been supposed that 
the fullest possible enjo5niient is to be found by extending our 
ego to infinity, the truth is that the fullest possible enjoyment 
is to be found by reducing our ego to zero." This is just what 
Jesus, the carpenter Son of God, did; and we name the virtue 
humihty; and at the end, in the very shadow of the impending 
cross, we hear him saying, "These things have I spoken unto 
you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might 
be full." Oh, friends, a prophetic soul in the twilight period 
had said, "Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my 
sorrow," and modern interpreters, applying this to Jesus, have 
called him the Man of Sorrows. Behold and see: is there any 



220 THE LIFE INDEED 

joy like the joy of a strong, self-denying, creative, humble 
faith? 

When Jesus came down from the mountain where in sight 
of all the kingdoms of the earth He had met and solved the 
problem of life in His own godlike way, He came down to 
what Satan and the world would have called an inglorious anti- 
climax. He had stood before the opened heavens and heard 
the Voice; had received the baptism of water and the spirit, 
dove-like yet with eternal power ; and the upshot was — He 
went home to Nazareth, among His old-time neighbors, bent 
on healing diseases and opening prison doors, on cheering the 
poor and turning His hand, as you and I may do, to 

that best portion of a good man's life, 

His little, nameless, unremembered acts 
Of kindness and of love; 

not going out of His way for the activities of life, but taking 
them as they came. And when men, dimly feeling the power 
of the highest in the humblest, began to respond, coming in 
crowds to the light and warmth of His presence. He ''was 
moved with compassion toward them, because they were as 
sheep not having a shepherd"; their ailment was not that they 
were hungry, that was only incidental, but that they had not 
discovered the principle of self-guidance within them. So He 
was not supremely concerned to give them a meal of victuals; 
that again was only incidental; rather ''he began to teach them 
many things." He labored to make men see and accept life 
as the indwelling grace of God has given it promise and po- 
tency. He did not bring up their past before them at all; 
rather He took His stand on the new beginning of things, blot- 
ting out that past in which they had wrought the will of the 
Gentiles, and opening the future. So it was consistently in 
His treatment of all. When the woman whom the hard legal- 
ists were ready to stone for her sin was brought to Him, 
ashamed and cowering before the purity of His light. He said, 
"Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more." There 
had come a new and endless opportunity for every one. And 
before His ministry was over. He had announced that the Son 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 221 

of man — the man that He would have all of them be, accord- 
ing to their faith — was Lord of the sabbath, f orgiver of sins, 
and candidate for resurrection. The heavens that opened to 
Him are thrown freely open to alL 



II. THUS IT BECOMETH US 

And now, in this new warmth and light and life, what shall 
the spirit of man do? What shall he do, first of all, with the 
law, under which hitherto he has subsisted, and which the mind 
and customs of men have laden with prescriptions, and con- 
ventions, and all in which the good order of society is involved? 
Ours is a world of law, unbending, impartial; science and his- 
tory alike have discovered that; and however bold and free 
the venture of the spirit, it must not be toward anarchy or 
toward a wild caprice; the tether of law and order is still there, 
no jot nor tittle impaired. The spirit of life, evolved to this 
godlike point, must have its higher law of the spirit of life; 
else it will be the slave and irresponsible minor it has always 
been. 

I have already described this law of the spirit of life, psy- 
chologically, as a kind of overflow or surplusage, whereby the 
life of the soul is set in the outward and neighbor-regarding 
current, not in the inward and self-regarding; and the spirit 
of man itself, when it is committed to this great reversal of 
direction, I have described as free from all tyranny of alien 
will, joyously free to be and to do just what it wills. We are 
now to see how this grand reversal was applied to the laws and 
prescriptions of men; how that spirit wrought as a simple ob- 
ject lesson in the life of the Son of man. What can pure in- 
itiative, instinct if you please, when vitalized by the spirit with- 
out measure, be trusted to do in the realm of conduct; or in 
other words, when it makes its own law and adopts, or over- 
rides, the laws already in the field? The law has been the 
great world burden. The spirit is the great emancipation. 
Shall the spirit work then by throwing off the burden and ab- 
rogating law, in other words by debasing the long evolved ideal 



222 THE LIFE INDEED 

of living; or shall it confirm and exalt the law by stimulating 
men to do more, and thus stand strong and loyal under the 
burden? It is the decision of this alternative that we look for 
in Christ's life, as applied to the laws that men have come to 
reverence. The law of Christ, — what shall it be? Well, St. 
Paul sums it up not inaptly, and throws a gentle radiance over 
the whole ministry of Jesus, when, in terms of exhortation, he 
says, ''Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of 
Christ." This really tells the whole story of Him who emp- 
tied Himself of heavenly distinction and dignity in order to 
identify Himself with the estate of manhood. Being found in 
fashion as a man, He bore the burdens of a man, and was con- 
stant in helping others, and infused the spirit of rest into all 
who came to Him laboring and heavy laden. 'Tor," said He, 
"my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." 

Yet this was no truckling or nerveless acquiescence; it 
tingled with wisdom and searching criticism of the empire of 
law; nor was it without moments of flaming indignation di- 
rected especially against those who were most scrupulous and 
strenuous in maintaining the law, the Scribes and Pharisees. 
He was an iconoclast as truly as He was an upbuilder. It is 
important therefore that we note, in this new light of the spirit 
of life, both what He built up and what He tore down, in His 
dealings with the prevailing structure of law. 

To get at His spirit of upbuilding, of uttermost construc- 
tiveness, we do best, I think, to interrogate His attitude toward 
the small things of the world's rules and customs, the things 
that because they are insignificant or do not happen to apply 
to us, we are apt to neglect or disparage, making an exception 
in our own favor. There are many such things; in fact, for 
the most of us, the law, as related to our conduct, is almost > 
wholly made up of such little observances. We never figure 
in police and court-room annals; the big laws against arson 
and house-breaking and fraud are dead letters to us, wholly 
out of our inner world. It is the littlie things, the trifles about 
which is said de minimis non curat lex, the law does not care 
for trifles, and which can be measured only by the general 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 223 

spirit of observance or transgression, that really enter into 
our lives. And of these Jesus taught that the spirit which is 
tenderly observant of these small things is really the largest, 
most constructive spirit; He singled out, you remember, as 
least in the kingdom of heaven, him who despised one of the 
least of these commandments and taught men so, while He 
called men great in the kingdom according to their attitude 
toward little and non-essential things. Get the spirit of your 
life rightly related to these, and the essential things will take 
care of themselves. 

And so, as best expressing Jesus' fundamental attitude to 
the laws and rules of men, I have chosen the remark He made 
in answer to John the Baptist, when He came to the Jordan 
to be baptized. The rite of baptism, as John had instituted 
it, connoted sin and repentance; it was the act by which men 
told the world that a revolution had taken place in them, that 
they had broken with an old order and were making ready 
for a new one. In Jesus, as soon as He appeared, John recog- 
nized an exception to this rule, an exemption, if ever there was 
one, from the requirement. ^'I have need to be baptized of 
thee," he said, "and comest thou to me?" Jesus knew this as 
well as John; He knew what the sound sense of the situation 
demanded. What a chance there was for Him here; how 
easily He could have told the world a new thing, — that here 
among them at last was sinlessness, fulness of life, perfect 
immunity from the evils and depravities of the human lot, and 
therefore perfect freedom from men's blundering laws and 
institutions. How easily, even before He went to the wilder- 
ness. He could have yielded to the second temptation, and 
emphasized the god ! But no : He had not come to the Jordan 
to pose as an exception to rules; if men came eventually to 
recognize His godlikeness it must be by another way, by a 
way in which they also might be included. "Suffer it to be 
so now," was His reply to John, "for thus it becometh us to 
fulfil all righteousness." What depth of meaning in that word 
"us" here, and what liberal and limitless interpretation of that 
eternal ideal righteousness! So he submitted to this perfectly 



224 THE LIFE INDEED 

unnecessary and for His case meaningless thing, in order to 
march shoulder to shoulder with those everywhere on whom 
life had imposed prescriptions of law and rite and custom. 

This was not a solitary example. It laid hold on the whole 
fibre of His manhood spirit. A later incident reveals how truly 
this compliant obedience was of His very nature, and no mere 
expediency or opportunism conditioned by occasion. The 
Jewish officials came once to Him and His disciples to collect 
the temple-tax of half a shekel, a poll-tax imposed on every 
member of the state church. He knew, and He made His dis- 
ciples know, that as Son of God and therefore essential Lord 
of the temple He was exempt. To tax Him at all for the serv- 
ices wherein His was the spirit to be worshipped and main- 
tained was an anomaly and an affront; and to pay it was really 
to buy the worship of Himself. That is not the way, He said, 
that kings of the earth do; they take tribute of strangers, and 
the children are free. True worship, if it is anything at all, is 
a freedom, a spontaneous uprise of heart. There was a prin- 
ciple at stake here; as truly as there was in Boston a century 
and more ago, when our forefathers met in the Old South 
Church and refused to pay the tax on tea. I am not judging 
them. But what does He do? ^'Notwithstanding," He says, 
"lest we should offend them, go thou," — provide the money 
for every one of us and pay the tax. Offend them — whom? 
The government of nation and church; an institution, an ab- 
straction you say, under which, if men can make their case 
good, a great many feel perfectly free to declare off or scale 
down their taxes. Here again I am not judging; it is the 
spirit of the thing that counts. And the spirit that was in Him 
was not determined by this or that opportunity, this or that 
abstraction, this or that loop-hole of exception; it was the 
intrinsic spirit of love itself, which is as mighty to abstain from 
causing offense, as it is to exert itself positively. And it was 
by this very act of abstaining from offense, of guarding His 
good from being evil spoken of, that the way was kept open 
for the positive beneficence which He had supremely at heart. 

In fact, this whole business of law, so far as men can embody 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 225 

it in enactments and institutions, is mainly an affair of ab- 
staining, the negative matter of letting your neighbor alone, 
so that he can be as free to live as you are. That is why all 
the old commandments are couched in the words "Thou shalt 
not." They are adapted to a lower human nature, not yet 
fit for freedom, which unless restrained would tend always to 
molest the neighbor and make his life and property insecure. 
The law, after all, is only the established way of clearing the 
ground so that love to neighbor, when it is positively evolved, 
may have free course. And so it is an embodied prophecy of 
the coming freedom; a prophecy and preparation. But the 
essential command of the developed freedom is no more nega- 
tive but positive, 'Thou shalt"; it is the outward current of 
spirit, engaged in actual service and upbuilding. It takes men 
on the ground of their higher and regenerate nature, and sets 
that in motion. This is what, if we read them in the new spirit, 
all the old commands really meant. 'Tor this," as St. Paul 
says, " 'Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill. 
Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou 
shalt not covet,' and if there be any other commandment, it 
is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, 'Thou shalt 
love thy neighbor as thyself.' Love worketh no ill to his 
neighbor: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law." And 
when the question comes up, "Who is my neighbor?" you re- 
member how Jesus answers it. Your neighbor, a neighbor? 
Why, every one who has the spirit of loving-helpfulness is a 
neighbor; a Samaritan, an outcast, just as truly as a priest or 
a Levite; there is no aristocracy or foreign element here. You 
recall with what wonderful skill, in His parable of the Good 
Samaritan, Jesus turned the point of His critic's question: His 
answer amounts to this. It is your business not to hunt up a 
neighbor, or to ask whom you can secure that will neighbor 
you; it is your one business to be a neighbor, and the rest 
follows of itself. And however far upward that spirit extended, 
He never limited it. Even when it reached the source of law 
and obligation, that abstraction which we call government, 
His answer, classic for all time, was, "Render therefore unto 



226 THE LIFE INDEED 

Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things 
that are God's." It is all, from beginning to end, a free render- 
ing, no compulsion or evasion; it is a motion of the law of the 
spirit of life. 

In his Sermon on the Mount, you remember, our Lord runs 
over some of the main points of the venerable laws and customs 
in which He finds men moving; and it is passing wonderful 
how, as soon as He touches them, He lets in the light and air 
of the spirit upon them, so that things fall into their real per- 
spective and balance. And every one of His principles, when 
He says, ''Ye have heard how it hath been said of old time, 
. . . but / say unto you," — every one of these turns on 
what our fellow man is to us, and what our inner attitude to 
him is. If you are doing your duty to fellow man — and this 
is what ideal law connotes, — a great deal, I was going to say 
everything, depends on what you take your fellow man to be. 
I was quoting, you remember, Carlyle's description of how his 
friend John Sterling entered upon the life in the world that his 
character and education fitted him for. From this description 
he goes on to say: 'Tor alas, the world, as we said, already 
stands convicted to this young soul of being an untrue, un- 
blessed world; its high dignitaries many of them phantasms 
and players' masks; its worthships and worships unworship- 
ful: from Dan to Beersheba, a mad world, my masters . . . 
Truly, in all times and places, the young ardent soul that enters 
on this world with heroic purpose, with veracious insight, and 
the yet unclouded 'inspiration of the Almighty' which has given 
us our intelligence, will find this world a very mad one." The 
world is indeed a fair enough place, Carlyle continues, to get 
rich in, or to raise a little temporary applause of flunkies and 
toadies; but "for any other human aim, I think you will find 
it not furthersome. If you in any way ask practically. How 
is a noble life to be led in it? you will be luckier than Sterling 
or I if you get any credible answer, or find any made road 
whatever." A promising approach to the world this, for a 
young man, is it not, to presuppose it as made up of madmen 
and fools, and you the only sane mind in it? What is such 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 227 

a world going to be, in its response to you, or you to it, in the 
things you undertake or inculcate? 

Our Lord's polar contrast to this disparaging attitude illus- 
trates what it is the business of this chapter to trace, His di- 
vine creative faith in human nature; a faith which goes 
beyond man as He finds him, as far as eternity beyond, and 
adapts its working to the nobility of nature which is in po- 
tency, and which through the power of that faith is yet some 
day to be. And His attitude toward law, in accordance with 
the trend of law, expresses the negative side of this faith, — 
what man is not to be, as related to us. He begins with the 
greatest crime a man supposably can commit, the crime of 
murder. What is the real essence of murder? If you kill. He 
says, you have, under the law, put yourself in danger of the 
judgment; you have raised the question how far you are or 
are not justified. But I say unto you, if you are angry with 
your brother causelessly, and call him Raca, a good for 
nothing, treating him so, you are in danger of a higher judg- 
ment, the inner verdict of the spirit; and if you call a man a 
fool and treat him so, you are in danger of a great deal fierier 
thing than judgment; it is the worst way of killing him, so 
far as you are concerned, for it puts him with the brutes and 
cuts off his chances of life altogether. This strikes a pretty 
high standard, to begin with; but from this He goes on to even 
graver things. He next raises the question. How shall you 
treat that woman, any woman, no matter whom? Shall you 
treat her as if she were not even so high as a fool, but only a 
soulless thing, to minister merely to your wanton lusts? Well 
then, you have broken the commandment, in the very worst 
way. How shall you treat that wife of yours, that divinely 
ordained partner of your life and lot? Shall you treat her as 
if she were only a slave, or a casual toy, whom, as soon as 
she does not furnish all the congeniality and domestic mating 
you crave, you may heartlessly turn away, into all the risks 
of destitution and sin? Why, just as every man is your 
brother, so that woman, whoever she is and whatever her legal- 
ized relation, is your sister, one of the same great family, a 



228 THE LIFE INDEED 

potential temple of the same spirit that dwells in you. Let 
therefore that spirit at its best, which is the spirit of universal 
love, have free, patient, forgiving course; and be not too ready 
to forbid its working. It comes back, after all, not to her but 
to you; are you able to bear your weight on that spirit? Then 
a step further still He goes, and brings the solution of it all 
in view. How shall you treat that enemy of yours — no fool 
or soulless thing this time, but in active hatred and malice 
against you? Here is your chance to treat men as they ac- 
tually are. Well now, are you going to hate him back again, 
giving as good as you get? Why, then, you are weakly letting 
him set the copy for you to live by. Your regard for him is 
just as big as his for you, no bigger; and so your treatment 
is just the same as the old crude notion of an eye for an eye 
and a tooth for a tooth. Is it for you, in your adult ideal of 
life, to be such a helpless echo of another that you cannot love 
him until he begins the game and loves you, or do him a good 
turn until he has virtually compelled it by doing good to you? 
Why, sinners and publicans, the very outcasts do as much as 
that. What thanks have you, what surplusage and overflow of 
life, if you do no more than that? That is not the copy that is 
set for your living. Look up to the God who made you and 
him, and in whose creative love all your life has grown and 
thriven. He is all the while sending His sun and rain on the 
evil and the good, on the just and the unjust alike; even in 
their blasphemy and rebellion they are living on His unweary- 
ing grace. There is your copy. There is the law of your adult 
manhood. Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in 
heaven is perfect. A tremendously high standard this, I 
grant you; but not to be like Him, when you see Him as He 
is, is to be like a publican and a sinner, is to be less 
than your accepted standard, your legal standard even, of the 
human. 

So then, by Jesus' estimate, it ministers neither to life nor 
law to treat the world of men like fools or things or aliens or 
enemies; what if, as Carlyle assumes, it is "a mad world, my 
masters"? The dictate of this new pulsation of faith, so di- 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 229 

vinely unreasonable, is not at all what the world is but what 
you are, and what your brave insight sees the world, far hence, 
to be capable of being, — capable because it is your family 
and you, as brother of the world, are capable. But this, you 
say, produces a misfit of conditions. Yes: it does. It was 
just to this misfit of conditions that Christ, in His supreme 
historic venture, committed Himself. He was courageously 
working for the far result; was sowing the seed of love and 
faith which would little by little germinate into a springtide 
and harvest of new life. What a tremendous originality and 
initiative in it all ! He knew how the first generation, His own 
contemporaries, took it and would take it; knew what is in the 
childish heart of man always. They were like children sitting 
in the market-places and peevishly reproaching their fellows 
for not playing as they wanted. John the Baptist was too 
austere and ascetic; and you would think they wanted nothing 
but gaiety and comradeship. Jesus was a comrade, entering 
into all the amenities of society and eating and drinking; and 
you never saw such ascetic people as they wanted to be; all 
his good fellowship was to them only gluttony and winebibbing. 
There is the childish in man to be reckoned with; to go con- 
sistently on your own higher way of life runs all the risk of 
being a misfit. But wisdom is justified of her children; the 
leaven of the kingdom will work unseen; and here and there 
men who will stop being childish long enough to be really child- 
like will find that the power of that strong consistent love and 
faith which makes them dare to live their life as it ought to 
be lived, is their one hope, their one open door of salvation. 
Think then how much it means, that when Jesus put Himself 
under the law of His kind. He did not treat His kind as de- 
praved and corrupt, as law-breakers and sinners, but rather 
as heirs of a limitless potency of life. And as the foundation 
of His theology He lays it on us to treat men likewise, and 
to dare the consequences. Does it not look, friends, as if, when 
we read His life in its large proportions, we must change the 
centre of gravity of our whole dogmatic system? Have we 
not tried to save men by cobbling and patching-up work long 



230 THE LIFE INDEED 

enough? Does not the time past suffice us to have treated 
our brother's human heart as deceitful above all things and 
desperately wicked, — whether it is so or not? It is time, I 
think, to try Christ's way, the way of divinely directed spiri- 
tual evolution, whereby the law of His being is fulfilled by 
the outward current of grace. That is what it amounts to. 

To me one of the most touching incidents of our Lord's 
whole life is that single gesture recorded of Him when they 
brought Him the woman taken in adultery. There they stood, 
sinners all, looking in ill-concealed glee to see what judgment 
He would pronounce on their broken law. There was she, 
guilty and ashamed, expecting that this holiest Being of all 
would the next moment give the word that would put her out 
of life. It was a moment big with suspense and heart-search- 
ing. "But Jesus stooped down, and with his fingers wrote on 
the . ground, as though he heard them not." What did He 
write? men have curiously asked and conjectured; He of whom 
this is the only record of writing. He who alone is authorized 
to write the sentence by which the whole world is judged. 
Many are the answers given, according as men read the mind 
of Christ. Did He write their sentence there? Not so : rather, 
they wrote it themselves, in their guilty slinking away, just 
as soon as He spoke again. Was it then an evasion on His 
part, whether because He was at loss what to say, or because 
He would not give words to His indignation? Or was He, as 
some think, hiding the blush that rose to His face at thought 
of the whole shameless business? None of these conjectures 
are satisfying, and perhaps we are over curious to inquire at 
all. It has always seemed to me as if this simple act were 
His way of keeping silent about the shame that He found in 
His adopted family of man; as if when they would force Him 
to declare judgment He would not bring Himself to tell tales 
out of school. If we all are reticent about our domestic af- 
fairs, and especially, as the phrase is, will not wash our dirty 
linen in public, would we expect Him, the most tactful and 
charitable of all, to blurt our human baseness to the universe? 
His silence was His loyal reticence about the adopted family. 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 231 

His brothers and sisters, for whom by His faith He would hold 
the gate of life always open. 

Yet, as I have intimated, this very Son of man did not 
scruple to be a flagrant law-breaker and iconoclast, when men's 
laws had ceased to be God's law, and no longer ministered to 
life. The life of man was the supreme concern, not the law. 
So it came about that the very law by which the Scribes and 
Pharisees set most store, and which perhaps they had reduced 
to the minutest and exactest enactment, was the law that He 
cast bluntly back in their teeth as an unholy thing. I refer to 
His treatment of the prescribed Sabbath observance. Here 
was a law that could be accurately codified. The elders could 
measure off just how many inches a man might travel, just 
what things he might and might not eat, just what he might 
do about cooking and dressing and visiting and worshipping 
and working; it was all capable of iron-bound rules. And 
being so exact on the side of the letter, it was equally suscep- 
tible to evasions and accommodations and scalings-down, when 
one had not the spirit of it in his heart. Our Lord, you know, 
went on doing His works of mercy without stopping to in- 
quire what day it was, and when His disciples were hungry 
let them pluck the corn and eat; to Him the day was just as 
sacred, and just as great an opportunity, as any day. This 
exasperated them; it did not beseem a prophet and teacher of 
men; did not make the Sabbath sanctified enough, in other 
words gloomy and lazy and useless enough, to suit them. What 
is a holy day for, except to be useless to any one but God? 
Well, you remember what an arrant Sabbath-breaker He was; 
and how consistently He devoted the day not to excuses for 
laziness and austerity but to royal opportunities for man's 
highest work, his work of helpfulness and mercy, which can 
be so much better done then as he has not the cares of daily 
livelihood to interfere. ^'My Father worketh hitherto," He 
said, "and I work." One is holy enough for that or any day, 
if he does as God does. So His ideal was not to break 
the Sabbath but to fulfil it by putting it to the highest uses 
after which a true man's life yearns and longs; to make it the 



232 THE LIFE INDEED 

best day by doing the most godlike things. That he will do, 
if it is supremely in him to do it. It comes back, after all, to 
the spirit of man. You cannot make a man keep the Sabbath 
by legislating a Sabbath; and a man cannot keep the Sabbath 
by going through external motions, however pious, or even by 
lying abed all day. If it is separated from other days it must 
be separated on some other principle. It comes back to the 
spirit of the man himself; the active, unforced, spontaneous 
spirit of life. When the apostle John Eliot, at Newton, tried 
to evangelize the Indians, it is said he had very little difficulty 
in persuading them to rest on the Sabbath; the real difficulty 
came in when he tried to get them to work on any other day. 
There was the rub; I don't think, however, we would call it 
too much Sabbath, but too little man. As for the Mosaic 
Sabbath, the day of rest, — well, there are two ways of getting 
at that. One is, if the bent is in you to be useless, to make it 
a day of cessation and inaction; the other is, to make it a day 
when, like a sweet home-coming and recreation, it is rest and 
refreshment to you to do the highest manhood work. The 
Sabbath was made for man, for man at his best, not man for 
the Sabbath. And what that noblest manhood work is, we 
have the life of the Son of man to answer, and the restful work 
of love that He never ceased to do. ^'Therefore," He says, 
''the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath.'' I think the 
Christian world has done not unwisely, by changing the day 
of the week and the name of the day, to transfer our holy day 
from the ideal of cessation to the perpetual ideal of the highest 
to which the Son of man may rise, the ideal of resurrection 
to new life; I think it not only immensely hallows the day, 
but better fulfils the Mosaic law of rest too. Here therefore, 
as otherwhere, our Lord came not to destroy but to fulfil. 

Our Lord's severest denunciations were directed against 
those leaders and pace-setters of society who would take oc- 
casion of their position to bind grievous burdens upon men, 
and then not stir a finger to lift such burdens themselves. 
"Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" Abraham had 
once asked of God. Shall not the judges and guides of men 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 233 

obey their own laws? It is a very easy and hypocritical thing 
to live under an empire of law if the other fellow is to do all 
the obedience. Jesus' sympathies were always with the under 
man, the bearer of the burden, the man whose business it was 
to be governed; He would begin with this man because He 
would make the law of his being sound all the way up, from 
bottom to top. Into this essential man He would breathe the 
spirit which would enable him, in a new athletic vitality, both 
to make and to keep his own law. The law itself would turn 
out to be the same old law of manhood which the ages had 
already hallowed as the law of God, only transfigured, quick- 
ened, made self-acting; and this it would be by being taken 
in on the way, as man commits himself to the full outward 
current of life, the current of grace, love, forgiveness, brother- 
hood. This is what it all mounts up to. The law is there, 
intact, no jot nor tittle lacking; but it has become a thing of 
course, an incident of life. In the life of brother love there is 
no more call to bother about rules of living than there is to 
take thought for breathing or digestion. As a body of pre- 
scribed rules telling you what not to do, the old law is dead; 
not, however, because it is abrogated, but because it is buried 
up in the natural functions of life. 

In the ancient prophetic ideal it was said of the Servant of 
Jehovah who was to come: ''The Lord is well pleased for his 
righteousness' sake; he will magnify the law, and make it 
honorable." And is it not so? The self -regarding leaders of 
Israel, priests though they were and endlessly self-righteous, 
had run their law into pettiness and limitations; had fenced 
it round everywhere with puerile interpretations, which were 
one and all like breathing-places where a man could stop obey- 
ing and begin to evade or accommodate. They had belittled 
the significance of the very terms they used; like the French, 
whose word homage is attenuated to mean outward flattery of 
women, and whose word vertu is whittled down to a fine piece 
of furniture or old china. What do you suppose the upper 
class of Jews called righteousness? They gave the name to 
alms-giving; that was doing righteousness; and when our Lord 



234 ^^^^ ^^^^ INDEED 

tells His disciples not to do their alms before men to be seen 
of them, He uses the current term, telling them not to do their 
righteousness in that way. Righteousness, that far ideal of 
truest living, had become largely a thing done for show, like 
a contribution to charity, a thing in which it was quite feasible 
for the spirit not to go along with it at all, but just to send a 
check — and get a popular credit on the books for beneficence. 
Why, the poor widow with her two mites, all she had, was do- 
ing more righteousness than the whole crowd of them. And 
so He told His disciples, whom He was educating in the spirit, 
that except their righteousness exceeded the rirhteousness of 
the Scribes and Pharisees the kingdom of heaven was no place 
for them. For the thing that He had unearthed in their lives 
was, not only that their petty interpretations and restrictions 
had belittled the whole scheme of the law ideal, but that they 
had honeycombed it with hypocrisies. He told His disciples 
to beware of their ''leaven," which is hypocrisy; all that silent 
pervasive ferment of influence and spirit, which we figure by 
leaven, and which is the most beautiful illustration, on the 
true-hearted scale, of the growing kingdom of heaven, was in 
them an unreal thing, a lie, making a pretense of things that 
are not. The Greek word for hypocrisy, you know, is the 
word that they use for play-acting; an actor, whose business 
it was to represent the shows of things, was in their language 
a hypocrite. So His indictment against the Scribes and Phar- 
isees was that they were living a put-on life, pretending to be 
righteous while they were not, and putting their righteousness 
into the concrete observances that men could see and applaud. 
And all the while there stood the law of righteousness ma- 
jestic before them, confessed in their words and their fashions, 
a silent monument of the homage that the counterfeit always 
pays to the true. We do not counterfeit worthless things but 
valuable things; our hypocrisies are our testimony to the law 
of truth, that it is holy and just and good. But with Jesus, 
the true Servant of Jehovah, the ancient prophecy has come 
true, by the plain and sterling way of the inner spirit. ''He 
will magnify the law, and make it honorable." With Him it 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 235 

has become a thing large and universal, a law of highest na- 
ture; no longer a thing for the under man to groan under and 
for the upper man to evade and falsify; no longer an affair of 
codes and fine distinctions, as if it were a thing made out of 
paper; and no longer restrictive at all, nor any bridle on the 
free spirit of man, which is the spirit of brotherhood. Its very 
negative trend, its ''thou shalt not," has become the fine and 
delicate tact of Him who will no wise hurt or offend. So in 
the honorable relations of man and man which it establishes, 
when observed in the spirit, we know now for the first time in 
history what its supreme ideal, righteousness, means. 

ni. TO THIS END WAS I BORN 

Very evidently it is a King of men who is moving so calmly 
and genially among us; the more kingly as His presence is 
more approachable, and as by His impact on every individual 
heart He works to make His realm a veritable democracy of 
kings and priests. We have seen it in the laws He reaffirms 
and interprets, and in the steady attitude of upbuilding which 
He has at heart. We are to ask now how He Himself defined 
all this, and what end of it He set before Him. His plans were 
broadly laid. He came down from the exceeding high moun- 
tain not only with a plan of life which could be carried out in 
humility and open-heartedness, but with a plan of empire. We 
cannot, as some do, think, with the words ''Thou art my be- 
loved Son" in our ears, that His career was in any sense an 
accident or a makeshift. When the temporary emergency 
arose He indeed did, as the old phrase is, "the next thing"; 
but it was always both the preordained thing and the most 
far-reaching thing, a thing which never had to be undone. 
Every event in His ministry, being an event of the t5^ical man- 
hood, came to stay. 

The upbuilding, vitalizing agency on which He relied, as we 
have abundantly seen, was simply love, or as St. John calls it, 
grace: which is just love initiative, love which does not wait 
for merit or dignity or lovehness to call it forth, and which 



236 THE LIFE INDEED 

does not make demands or conditions, but exerts itself un- 
provoked out of its own infinite fulness, which is identified 
with the creative and upholding power of the universe. It is 
this grace that He lives ; this that He brings in all lowly offices 
of good to His neighbors and to needy ones; this, in its ap- 
plication all the way from kinsman to enemy, that He lays as 
ideal on all who would learn of Him. This was the initial 
kingliness He brought to men; this, in application, constituted 
His social norm and code of law. 

But this new way of treating men, inoffensive as it was and 
the highest note of evolution, could not have undisturbed 
course. The very contrast it made men aware of in their own 
hearts would of necessity make it a standing reproach to their 
ways, and so cause reaction. Too evidently, at the first im- 
pact, it would not bring peace on earth, but a sword. There- 
fore such love to men must have not only impulse but staying- 
power. As some one has expressed it, ''An icy air and the 
hard rock of selfishness were conditions which hindered the 
growth of the germ which lay in the creation.'^ Besides, in 
the view of things to which men were used, the very complete- 
ness of that grace seemed an element of weakness; it was so 
tender, so undemanding, seemed as it were a kind of collapse 
of the whole pride of aggressive manhood. To this day we all 
find it the hardest thing in the world to incorporate in our na- 
ture. Men can so override it, so take advantage of it, so trade 
upon it, as if having only grace to play against they had all 
the tricks of the game in their own hands. A schemer, or a 
bunco man, it would seem, could not desire a more facile prey 
than this offers; so apparently unsuspicious that all the zest 
is taken out of the game. And so of those who are good with- 
out any spice of malice or retaliation we get up a proverb, say- 
ing, "So good that he is good for nothing," and think there is 
something lacking in their brain; and of ourselves we say, 
''Yes, I can forgive, and I can love my enemy, up to a certain 
point, but" — and that but sets a limit, lower or higher, where 
we can stop loving and begin to pay the world off in its own 
coin. We have moments when, as to Machiavelli it seems to 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 237 

us, 'That the Christian faith has given up good men in prey 
to those tliat are tyrannical and unjust"; and we subscribe 
heartily to Lord Bacon's wise advice: ''Seek the good of other 
men, but be not in bondage to their faces or fancies; for that 
is but facility or softness; which taketh an honest mind pris- 
oner." There is an authentic strain of integral human nature 
to reckon with here: our grace, our goodness, must be wise, 
must be an art of goodness, with tools, for all our strong 
personality to use, and sphere for all our skill and tact to 
work in. 

How shall Jesus meet this reaction which His grace is so 
sure to induce, meet it so that in the long run His meekness 
and humility shall not go under but survive and conquer? 
Shall He be gracious and nothing else, or must something more 
be added, to complete the endowment of the Son of man; and 
if so, what? 

St. John, you remember, in speaking of the Word made flesh, 
adds another element to the account. There He stood among 
men, God's idea spelled out in human life, and we beheld His 
glory, so pure and perfect that we saw therein the only-be- 
gotten Son of God; and the life He lived was full of grace and 
truth. This characteristic was what differentiated His era 
from the old dispensation: the law was given by Moses, but 
grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. We have seen the grace 
in practical working; going about doing good, healing diseases, 
announcing goodwill to men, as if these were all it had to do. 
And we have seen how lamblike and apparently defenseless 
such grace is against the evil onsets of men. What now shall 
we make of this second element, this supplementing endowment 
of truth, added to grace? St. John, who for all his mystic and 
poetic strain was a keen thinker in a logic of his own, has the 
most to say about truth of any of the New Testament writers; 
it is through him that we get the term and the large idea. But 
it is a tissue of many threads, both of thought and of life; 
and the other evangelists, though they do not make such free 
use of the name, contribute their part, as important as St. 
John's, especially in their record of the deeds He did, and in 



238 THE LIFE INDEED 

their revelation of His mind, which merits no less absolute 
name than the truth of life. 

Along in the middle of His ministry, or a little beyond, there 
came to Jesus what *we may call an enlargement of scale : His 
realization of His mission broadened and deepened; this we 
may say, whatever view we take of Him, for like all of us He 
lived and learned, learning obedience by the things He suffered. 
An untold shock it must have been to Him, that single-hearted 
villager working in such purity of love and faith, when the 
elders and scholars of the nation called it all devil's work and 
interpreted it by Beelzebub the prince of devils. It was this, 
you know, that called forth His warning about the sin against 
the Holy Spirit which could not be forgiven; to Him it was 
like an utter reversal of the laws of being. To think that the 
accredited guides and leaders, in whose keeping were the ruling 
standards and sentiments of men, should read life by the polar 
opposite of the real truth, was the sharpest stab that could 
have been given to His sensitive spirit. At that point a gap 
must needs open between Him and His beloved nation, that 
nation of which He had said, "salvation is of the Jews." Soon 
after this rebuff He extended His journeying into the coasts 
of Syro-Phenicia, the only occasion in His ministry, so far as 
we know, when He went beyond Jewish soil and came in con- 
tact with a foreign nation. And there, you remember. He found 
hearts just as hungry for life, and just as responsive to His 
healing power, as He had found in Galilee. The Syro-Pheni- 
cian woman, who would not accept His word, "It is not meet 
to take the children's bread and give it to the dogs," but was 
eager, like the dogs, to take some crumbs from the Master's 
table, — this woman conquered by her faith, and thus proved 
to His ever-open heart that foreigners too and heathen, alien 
in thought and antecedents, were just as truly open to the 
light He brought, and just as capable of assimilating His way 
of life, as were the lost sheep of the house of Israel. This 
discovery, though He had all the germs and premonitions of 
it before, produced a great enlargement of His scale of things; 
henceforth the whole world, and not a mere Jewish corner of 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 239 

it, was the sphere of His love and power. What if now the 
Jews did reject Him, and what if this contemporary genera- 
tion should vent upon Him all their malice and caprice, doing 
with Him as they listed, the same as they had done to John the 
Baptist? He had come in sight of a larger outlet of life, 
broader and loftier than could be cramped down to space and 
time, or thwarted by the prevailing evil of men. He had dis- 
covered that this life of His was adapted to work universally, 
and that the deep heart of man, wherever and whenever the 
life found it, had the susceptibility to lay hold of it and live. 
And we may be sure He was not slow to grasp and formulate 
the meaning of all this. 

That it worked on His heart and engendered great thoughts 
we know from the question that He asked His disciples on His 
way back from this foreign trip. Then it was, it would seem, 
that the tremendous idea of Messiahship came into His mind; 
He had hardly brought Himself to cherish it before, at least 
for Himself; He would not, until He had felt His way and 
knew He was right. And when now He did broach the idea, 
it was not by assertion; that was never His way; but by get- 
ting the opinion of those who, being always with Him, were 
best able to judge. "Whom do men say that I, the Son of man, 
am?" The disciples gave Him various answers, floating 
opinions like gossip, all more or less vague and laden with 
crude superstitions. Some, they said, called Him John the 
Baptist, come back from death to finish his work; some, Eli- 
jah, the prophesied forerunner; some, Jeremiah, come again 
perhaps to bring back the ark and the holy vessels which he 
had hid in a cave; and still others, one of the ancient prophets 
come to revive the prophetic word so long silent. None had 
made any large or lucid interpretation of Him. "But whom 
say ye that I am?'^ He asked; and when one of them, Peter, 
answered, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,'* 
His reply, so accordant with the thought that was surging in 
Jesus^ heart, was hailed as a discovery revealed not by flesh 
and blood but by the Father in heaven Himself. But He 
charged them to tell no man that He was Jesus the Christ; 



240 THE LIFE INDEED 

the thing was too sacred to be thrown Hke an idle gossip to the 
raw crude conceptions of men, or to make its way by proclama- 
tion, with its inevitable uprisings and revolutions; it must 
come to them by the way of their own hearts, as it had come 
to Him and Peter, and come only as their hearts were large 
enough to interpret the real glory of it. 

Here I must speak of an interpretation, lately promulgated, 
which I think errs by belittling and in a way belying our Lord's 
attitude to men and to His work. We have seen how 
He always spoke of the Son of man and the Son of God as if 
He were, so to say, working out a study, a theory, an ideal, 
of what this personage, whoever He individually was, should 
be and do. It was as if He were here on earth creating out of 
existing material an authentic type of manhood for the world 
to see and judge and accept. This type He was shaping every 
day, not by words and philosophy alone, but by deeds and by 
the way He met experiences as they came. But when it came 
to applying the names to Himself, or making high assumptions, 
that He left to others; His sane humility would not let Him 
claim for Himself more than men out of straight-seeing eyes 
could see. So when men asked Him to declare Himself, He 
always put the matter back upon them; as if He would have 
them put the data together and judge for themselves whether 
He answered to their ideal or not. When John the Baptist, 
who felt that the truth of his own announcement was at stake, 
sent from the prison the inquiry ^'Art thou he that should come, 
or look we for another?" the answer sent back to him was, 
''Go and tell John the things which ye do hear and see," — 
as if Jesus would say. There are the data ; you ought to know. 
Now the belittling interpretation of which I spoke relates to 
the answer that, as we note. He always made to His ques- 
tioners, high-priests or potentates, whoever would fathom His 
personality. "Art thou the Christ — the Son of God — the 
King of the Jews?" "Thou sayest," was always the answer. 
Now Professor Schmidt says that He made this answer as an 
evasion, because He knew He was not the Messiah and was 
honest enough to avoid saying He was, and so parried the 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 241 

question. This, it seems to me, introduces a false note into 
Jesus' character; if it makes Him honest it makes Him also 
cowardly. Why, I think that answer is just in the idiom of 
His whole non-assuming transparent life: ''Thou sayest" is 
equivalent to answering, ''That is for you to say." This com- 
ing of the Christ He regarded as a sharing, cooperative matter, 
wherein men had their part as well as the Christ. If it was 
for Him, or any one, to be the Messiah, it was for them to see 
Him as He was and name Him, according to the answer of 
their hearts. Else He was no Messiah to them; nor did He 
desire to be, on any other terms than free choice and recogni- 
tion. 

You know what happens as soon as Peter has made his con- 
fession, showing how Jesus has come to impress a big-hearted, 
genuine man of the people who has companied with him long. 
He calls that confession, and the spirit that can make it, a rock 
on which the church may be so built as to stand against the 
gates of hell. Then at once He begins to ponder on that great 
sacred trust of His, just as He had pondered on being Son of 
man and Son of God; as if He would study out its mighty con- 
tent, and learn what the Christ should be and do. The Christ 
idea had become so hallowed and magnified by the imagination 
of the ages that, like all great historic ideas, it had acquired 
an almost superhuman remotemess; but also there had gathered 
round it unworthy accretions of superstition and belittlement. 
And now that it had come close home to Him, to His own 
lowly life, the first thing to do was to clear up the idea, making 
it sane, livable, accessible. It was as if a world burden were 
laid on His shoulders. The wholesomest thought, duty, imagi- 
nation of the ages and the lands were concentrated in Him, 
this clear-seeing artisan of Galilee. He had been chosen for 
this high trust for the spirit that was without measure in Him ; 
the working of it out, then, must be as it were an obedience to 
heredity, the consistent way which His whole nature had al- 
ready started upon. Priests and Pharisees, with their sneer 
of devil's work, must not deflect Him one inch; He was on 
higher ground than the whims and blindness of a generation 



242 THE LIFE INDEED 

or a national form of religion. The hungering heart of aliens 
and heathen, sharing in the same large humanity, was calling 
Him; He must not disregard this universal need and capacity 
for a common faith. The Christ, the anointed King of men, 
must be a Christ for the ages and for the world; the redeem- 
ing Head of the whole family in heaven and earth, the firstborn 
of every creature. Such must have been the nature of the 
ponderings which Peter's confession and the events of the 
latest few days pressed upon Him. He vv^as confronting the 
greatest idea in the world, and was undertaking to incorporate 
it in His own life. No such sacred trust had ever been laid 
on mortal man before; no more godlike opportunity could ever 
come again. It must not therefore be entered on lightly or 
hastily; its deepest ultimate meaning must be studied out in 
secret, and preclude the risk of any false step. No wonder He 
told His disciples to keep quiet about so tremendous a revela- 
tion, until He could have time to feel and know His way. 

But as soon as He reached this table-land of Messianic con- 
sciousness, one element of the idea came to Him at once as an 
essential, elemental requisite. The Son of man, the anointed 
King and Type of manhood, must die. Death was a part of 
His kingliness; it stood there plain and obvious in the path to 
His glory. To be sure there was the death that all must die, 
the common lot of man; but in this new case the death, just 
because it was the common lot, must be other. It must be a 
death freely chosen, the more freely because it could so easily 
and naturally be evaded. And so it must be a death for men, 
a death that came as the uttermost expression of love. 
^'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his 
life for his friends." If, as hitherto, He was committed to the 
complete and ultimate revelation of the love of the Father, He 
must not flinch from this. In a world where sin so abounds, 
and where men's eyes are so blinded by it, grace must much 
more abound; it must prove that it is free grace, and the most 
godlike pulsation of all being, by abounding; it must abound 
by outlasting the deadliest that sin can do. If it cannot so 
outlast, taking sin's most venomous onsets yet remaining con- 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 243 

stant and active, then there comes a point where grace goes 
under and sin is the ruhng element in the world. This must 
not be; God, who is love, must not have created and led for- 
ward His handiwork in vain; manhood, whose spirit has risen 
dimly to such heights of capability, must not fail of that height 
which is the crown and solution of all. So there is nothing for 
it but that the Christ shall lay down His life for the world. He 
must do it, in order to be true to the ideal He has already pur- 
sued as Son of man; not to do it is to go back upon its 
sacredest demands and own the evil of man's heart too strong 
for Him. Now you can see how little of that ^'facility or soft- 
ness" which Lord Bacon deprecates, and which the world in 
its false pride despises, there is in boundless goodness to men. 
It is not ''bondage to men's faces or fancies," but the polar 
opposite; not bondage to their stormy malice and blindness 
either, but the heavenly freedom from it; it is the strong thrill 
of the eternal life smiting into time and putting there the vi- 
tality which overflows and outlasts. You can see now too 
how that strain of grace is also the strain of truth; it is true 
to itself and integral even to the end; meek and yielding as it 
seems, it abates no inch of its principle; it has the power and 
constancy of the eternal ongoings of the universe. 

So when the disciples get their glimpse of His essential Mes- 
siahship, the next thing Jesus does is to take them and sol- 
emnly tell them that the Son of man must be delivered into 
the hands of men and die at their hands and rise into the fulness 
of life that way. This is estranging to them and inexplicable; 
it contradicts all that their imagination has shaped of the 
Christ. When the Christ comes, must He not abide for ever, 
and if so, must He not be the grand exception to nature and be 
gloriously exempt from ignominy and death? If Enoch could 
be rapt away from earth without dying; if Elijah could rise 
in a chariot of fire; if Moses could fall asleep by "the kiss of 
the Eternal" ; if these could be historic exceptions to the mor- 
tal lot; how much more the highest and holiest of all. He whom 
God has anointed and crowned King of men. No, said Peter, 
right on the heels of his great confession ; no, this humiliation 



244 "^HE LIFE INDEED 

must not, cannot be. But here he met his sharpest rebuke. 
He was wrong, he was bHnd, to say so; it was, though he knew 
it not and though it was the impulse of loyalty, it was the Satan 
in him that urged the self-aggrandizement of Messiah and 
the royal exemption from death. How easy it thus was, in 
the presence of this ideal of outlasting grace, to become the 
tempter, the mouthpiece of the Adversary himself! John the 
Baptist had come, and rightly received, he had all the spirit 
and power of the promised Elijah ; but men did with him what 
they pleased, and they pleased to put him to death, just as 
they had served the other prophets. So with the Son of man; 
they will do with Him what they please; but at all events He 
must be to the uttermost the subject and target of their free 
will, and their salvation must hang on what they please to do, 
on the spontaneous choice they make, not on what they are 
forced to do. At all hazards the human spirit must have free 
play, whether in hatred or in love; in no other way can the 
freedom which is love have its supreme opportunity in their 
hearts. But so also must the Son of man assert His freedom: 
just by being true to Himself, true to the extreme of laying 
down the life that their blind hatred demands. Nor only so. 
If you, He says, my disciples, are going to follow after me, 
learning my way and sharing in my kingliness, you must every 
one of you deny yourselves, and take up your cross daily, and 
trudge forward patiently, stedfastly, strongly, in the way of 
that same death to sin. This is not the way for one anointed, 
glorified man alone; not a performance for your magnified 
Ideal to go through and leave you down below gaping in 
wonder; it is the godlike way of every man. Death too, for 
me and every man, must be no longer a bondage but a free- 
dom; you must learn to use it for all there is in it, by living 
the life that rises above it. For your goal is not to evade 
death, or even to get ready for death; your goal, no less than 
mine, is resurrection, the uprise of life on which death, though 
it come as the extreme of injustice and cruelty, has no power. 
We come here in sight of a new truth, a truth of untold sig- 
nificance for every man. In His wise way of bringing things 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 245 

into sound balance and relation, you remember how Jesus made 
it clear that law, that universal empire in which all nature 
is, is for the completed man merely an incident of life. Here 
now we behold a truth greater yet: that for the Messiah, and 
so ideally for every son of man, death is an incident of life. 
Amazing as it seems at first to us who see it taking away every 
dear one we have and waiting inexorably for us, this is the 
calm assurance on which He enters His high mission. Death 
is not extinction of life, not deflection from the life's currents, 
not stoppage and delay of vitality; not what to the eyes it 
seems to be at all. It is merely a station on the way to uprise 
and resurrection. Therefore it is not a motive of life; as if 
our business were to prepare for it, or in any way to change 
our attitude of life, in conformity to a thing that comes without 
preparation, and has no moral worth when it comes. There is 
nothing in it to make a motive out of. The life remains in- 
tact, with all its endowments of loyalty, righteousness, grace, 
truth; steps down to the tomb with all these vital motions 
strong as ever within it. At the same time Jesus hallows death 
into a life element, makes it from an inert characterless thing 
into a vital motive, by accepting it as death for the world and 
for truth, swinging it thus into the consistent line of love. It 
is an incident of life; but being the last enemy to be destroyed, 
it may be made the redeeming, crowning, holiest incident. And 
His death, with its world accompaniments, shall exhibit death 
to all the ages in its ultimate type and beauty. 

What then does this crisis in Jesus' ministry, when as Christ 
He confronted the eternal issues of life and death, demand? 
Simply that He go on being true to Himself and to life as He 
sees it. He is here, a man among men; working out the details 
of manhood life; He will not therefore take advantage of His 
Messiahship, as Peter urged, to introduce an exception into 
the order of things, or any miracle except such as by faith all 
could work. He will not assume the god, just because He is 
Messiah; rather He will be the more truly a man. The Mes- 
siahship has not changed His nature; rather it has given His 
Son-of-manship free course. This must express itself to the 



246 THE LIFE INDEED 

end, or rather, regardless of the end. It must use death as 
it will, putting it into its true subordinate place; and thus, by 
a supreme object lesson, deliver those, the shivering, paralyzed 
humanity, who through fear of death have been all their life- 
time subject to bondage. For the Son of man has it in Him 
to conquer that last enemy, by making it an authentic element 
of life. 

From this time, then, the record goes on to say, Jesus set 
His face stedfastly to go to Jerusalem, where He knew death 
awaited Him. There was a Messianic dignity and sublimity 
in this very resolve, which showed itself in His whole appear- 
ance and mien. It seemed to make Him larger than human. 
The disciples, you remember, were amazed as they saw Him 
going on before them; and like men dazed they followed, not 
knowing what it all meant. So in course of time He came to 
the capital city; and it happened to Him as He had foretold. 
Calmly and wisely He made His preparations, preparing His 
disciples for the event and for what should follow; putting into 
their minds strange words and predictions, which some time, 
when the stress and the need came upon them, they would re- 
member. Then He was set before the high-priest and ques- 
tioned on oath, Art thou the Messiah? ''Thou sayest," was 
His answer; that is for thee to say. But how do you prove it? 
There are my works and my words, open and plain; in secret 
have I said nothing. But He added a significant thing. This 
life of mine, it meant, is just the way of highest manhood, and 
whether you accept me or not, hereafter you shall see the Son 
of man, the divinely perfected manhood, coming in the clouds 
of heaven. That is the far end for which He is living, what- 
ever the event to Him individually. Then later He is brought 
before Pilate, the highest representative of kingly might and 
authority. Here is one of the sublime moments of history; 
a greater scene than Joan of Arc before her accusers, or Luther 
at Worms: the king of the land, with the handhng of brute 
life and death in his hands, and the King of men, with the gift 
of eternal life before which death becomes a paltry powerless 
thing. "Art thou the king of the Jews?" Pilate first asks; but 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 247 

Jesus puts the question aside as not relevant to Pilate himself; 
it makes no difference to Pilate whether Jesus is king of the 
Jews or not; that is a question for the Jews to determine. 
^'Art thou a king then?" Pilate goes on, in vaguely prescient 
apprehension, to ask. And the answer seems to me one of the 
most wonderful answers in all history. "Thou sayest that I 
am a king"; it is for thee to say whether I am a king, to say 
according to what your heart tells you. The appeal is to the 
heart of a Roman potentate, the representative of a mighty 
world-power whose genius is for law, organization, order, jus- 
tice; such a representative ought to know. Then He goes on 
to give the data: telling this king of the earth, for him to 
weigh and judge, what it is to be a king. "To this end was 
I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should 
bear witness to the truth. . Every one that is of the truth 
heareth my voice." A marvelous way this to be a king: just 
to be a true man, according to the ideal of manhood that birth, 
and the wise ages of prophecy, and the free movement of the 
spirit have put within Him. Such true manhood as this men 
will hear and obey, and thus make it their king, as soon as they 
will let the manhood that is in them speak and the true cur- 
rents of being have free course. But the definition is too 
simple for Pilate. He has always been so tangled up with ex- 
pediencies and opportunism, with schemes for keeping his po- 
sition intact and keeping his head on his shoulders, with 
politics and complicated policies, — in a word, with what we 
in modern days call the policy of "get there," of securing im- 
mediate ends, no matter what, by hook or crook, — that all 
conception of a determining truth and principle of being, of a 
character moving consistently and all together and to an ideal 
end, is atrophied and lost. "What is truth?" he asks, in utter 
bewilderment; and turns away; and belies the timidly rising 
nobility of his nature by 5delding once more to the tyrannous 
necessity of keeping his head on his shoulders, and weakly let- 
ting the clamorous Jews have all their will, and by trying to 
wash his hands of the whole matter. So that interview of the 
two kings resolves itself into the truth of life and falsity and 



248 THE LIFE INDEED 

weakness of life confronting each other. We see where the 
real strength remains, and when it comes to the encounter, 
which goes under. We see too that the power put momen- 
tarily into the false one's hands to crucify the True has nothing 
to do with the issue, except to make that Malefactor's death 
for ever glorious. 

How we have suffered ourselves to belittle our idea of truth! 
How far we have fallen short of seeing the sublimity of this 
simplest thing in life, being true to self and ideal! We too, 
like Pilate, have become tangled up in our expediencies, and 
our temporary makeshifts, and our worldly machinery, and 
our too convenient assumption that it is the business of human 
nature to be more or less sinful and fallen; until the straight 
road of life has become blurred and befogged, and our paths 
have become crooked. Truth is not a thing to tell; it is a 
thing to be. 'T am the truth," was our Lord's word to His 
disciples; and when He says to Pilate He has come into the 
world to bear witness to the truth, do you know what the word 
^'bear witness" means? It is the same word from which comes 
our word martyr. I am come to be martyr to the truth; that 
is what He says; to hold and live the truth of life in face of 
all that comes, be it policy or persecution or rejection or death; 
to hold up the truth of essential manhood high for all men to 
know. And in an age which had forgotten what truth was, 
and would not lift a finger for anything but its own selfish in- 
terests. He put a strain into the hearts of lowly men, fishermen 
and mechanics and the weak of the earth, which impelled them 
to walk joyfully to the stake and die for what was in them, 
martyrs to the same noble witnessing to truth. And He re- 
vealed that this is a divine thing; for a little later, when the 
meaning of things has time to shape itself, we hear St. Paul 
saying that the Holy Spirit witnesses with ours, is a martyr 
along with us, as we work out the wondrous determination to 
be true. It has become the glad freedom of life, according to 
the word which He said, "Ye shall know the truth, and the 
truth shall make you free." 

We have seen Him resolving on death, and setting His face 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 249 

stedfastly to go to Jerusalem. All this had a great philosophy 
of noblest life underlying it, a philosophy which, according to 
His wont, He drew from the analogies of God's great world of 
nature. When the Greeks, you remember, came to ask Him 
about His principle, He hailed the moment as the moment of 
His glorification, and gave them this explanation: ''Except a 
corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abide th alone; 
but if it die, it beareth much fruit." The same truth this, that 
St. Paul afterward takes up and restates, almost in scorn for 
those who will not see a thing so clear: "Thou fool, that which 
thou sowest is not quickened except it die." What a different 
face this puts upon death, just because it utilizes death in the 
way of being stedfast, and strong, and true. Such death, or 
rather such oneness of purpose and consistency to holiest man- 
hood, opens the Christ way for every lowliest, weakest one. 
He first trod the wine-press alone; was the pioneer to open 
the strange new way of life and truth. He who was the way 
and the truth and the life; but thenceforward the gate stood 
open for every one to enter. And as for Him, who first made 
this witnessing for truth the great object-lesson of martyrdom: 
''And I," He said, "if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw 
all men unto me." That is the crown of His kingliness: is 
there any other real test of kingliness adequate except this, 
that men come eagerly to be subject, to be loyal and free in 
His presence, because there is their one blessedness? How dif- 
ferent from the dominion that Satan promised Him on the ex- 
ceeding high mountain! It is the kingliness in which, by our 
response to the same spirit, we all become kings in our degree; 
all living the same strain of life, all bound for the like ending 
of it. So a little later we hear the same note of truth addressed 
as a hope and promise to every one: "Be thou faithful unto 
death, and I will give thee the crown of life." 

IV. THE DECEASE ACCOMPLISHED AT JERUSALEM 

We have seen the end which Jesus set before Him from His 
baptism: to be faithful to His ideal of Son of God by being 



2SO THE LIFE INDEED 

consistently Son of man^ and therefore the Brother of every 
human soul. We have seen how His thoughts were enlarged 
as the sense of His Messiahship came in full force upon Him; 
and how the enlargement was after all but the intensification 
of life in the same predetermined direction : faithfulness to the 
lowly occasion, and duty becoming faithfulness, bearing full 
weight of witness, martyrdom, to the full truth of manhood. 
There is no alteration of principle here; only an enlargement 
of scale: bearing witness to the truth is just faithfulness car- 
ried to its larger ultimate. If it is required of a steward that 
he be found faithful, of a king likewise, who is the steward of 
a loftier trust, it is required that He be true to the kingly ideal 
that is laid upon Him. And in Christ's case the idea reaches 
the height of grandeur from the fact, in which He and the 
Father were consciously at one, that the lot of the eternities 
had fallen on Him to be the Anointed One, the firstborn of 
many brethren, the King of kings. And we have seen how, 
"being found in fashion as a man," with the noble humility of 
manhood upon Him, He at once recognized that the logic of 
His situation required Him to be "obedient unto death, even 
the death of the cross." 

We have now to inquire how this end, which to Him was 
merely bearing witness to the truth, actually came to Him. 
Our inquiry will reveal some marvelous things, of which I can 
only say, you must not take them on my say-so, and it is for 
you to determine whether you will take them at all. My busi- 
ness is merely to tell you what the Bible says ; and if the Bible, 
which with all its wonders of record speaks throughout in the 
tone of perfect sanity and soberness, — if the Bible account 
is not true, well, we are left with life infinitely poorer and 
leaner, and we are yet in our sins. Hitherto it has lifted us 
step by step to heights of vision and an awesome rarity and 
purity of atmosphere; let us trust its pinion a little farther, 
and tell out the tale to the ending. 

There is a thing much spoken of in literature, and held as 
an absolute requisite to the art: the thing that men call "po- 
etic justice." The poet, you know, was figured by the Greeks, 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 251 

who are our arbiters in art, as a maker, a creator; that is what 
our term poet originally means: a creator of new ideals, new 
worlds of thought and imagery, new ranges of spiritual exist- 
ence. And it was required of these new creations that they 
be organic and self-consistent, and that when the end comes it 
shall come out right, with the potency and promise of its whole 
structure fulfilled. Otherwise its creative justice fails; it has 
not obeyed its law of being. As soon as we apply this principle 
to the literature of the Bible, we have brought this too into 
the court of poetic justice. Does this too come out right? I am 
not asking now whether it accords with that truth absolute to 
which we may commit our lives and destiny; that is a thing 
for our personal faith to settle ; but whether it comes out con- 
sistently with its beginning and its whole creative course. One 
thing we have noted about the life of Jesus: He has lived 
throughout as if He were a poet, creating a new world of ideal, 
putting into concrete expression the terms Son of God, Son of 
man. King of men, Messiah, the loftiest terms that can engage 
the poetic mind; creating this new world not in words alone, 
or philosophy, or beautiful imagery, but in the far more cogent 
eloquence of perfect deeds. In these, in bearing witness there- 
by to the truth as He saw it. His life has been absolutely of 
a piece. His committal to it has been the committal of utter- 
most faith. What now does the report tell us of the poetic 
justice of the case? How do things fit together, and how do 
they fit the larger meaning which we now know was the sequel 
to them? This, you see, is not the question how some deed 
of His would have looked at the time, to a company of be- 
wildered disciples who had no key to its purport or motive; 
but rather how it came to look when they saw how it came 
out, and when the spirit, their guide to truth, was taking the 
things of Christ and showing to them. Therein lies the key 
to this grand organism of poetic justice; it is quite analogous 
to the true reading of all inner history. There is poetry, spiri- 
tual creativeness, as well as fact, in every great movement of 
life and mind; much more then, it would seem, in the greatest 
movement of all. Goethe, when he wrote his autobiography, 



252 THE LIFE INDEED 

called it ''Dichtung und Wahrheit," poetry and truth; and 
many readers since his time, hide-bound in external fact, have 
accused him of taking liberties with reality and recording 
things merely fantastic and imaginative. Not so : that is what 
his life meant, to him; it took more than deeds alone to com- 
pass it; there was also, in the motive and meaning of the deeds, 
and in the ideals he had at heart, a claim of poetic justice. 
Just so, in its purer and loftier degree, in the life of Jesus: 
that too was truly a poem, which if true to highest manhood, 
must be as it were a work of divine art, and come out accord- 
ing to the claims of poetic justice. 

On our way, then, to the marvelous outcome of His life, let 
us pick up some of the connecting links and indications, and 
see how they fit together. 

We saw how a little past the middle of His ministry there 
seemed to have come to the carpenter-prophet a great enlarge- 
ment of range and scope; how He felt that the scale of His 
life and being was greatened; and how this was intimately 
connected, as would appear, with His consciousness of Mes- 
siahship. This enlargement of range we might describe to our 
metaphysician friends, who surely ought to have due deference 
paid to their idiom, as an expansion of being in two directions: 
the direction of space and the direction of time. In other 
words, it was as if He had come to see that in order to be 
truly Messianic the life and light that were in Him must be 
universal, fitted not to Jew alone, nor any mere ethnic condi- 
tion, but to Greek and heathen, to man as man, to the spirit 
that was dimly stirring in every remotest human life. This 
in the space direction. Then as to the time direction: the 
Messiah had from earliest times existed in the prophetic soul 
of the world, and He must, when arrived in flesh, be the same 
yesterday and to-day and for ever. As Anointed One of the 
ages He must, so to say, embody a power which should be at 
once active, pro-active, and retroactive, the divine power of the 
eternities, made visible and operative in human personality. 
No less tremendous ideal than this could fulfil the promise and 
satisfy the colossal poetic thought that had so long been strug- 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 253 

gling toward expression in the mind of the centuries. Does 
now the record of His life, from this enlargement onward, 
shape itself in some authentic degree to such poetic justice 
as this? If so, what gleams and flashes of this greater rela- 
tion of things shall we find in One who, even while He is aware 
of His majestic position, will not consent for one moment to 
cease being the approachable comrade and brother of every 
humblest man? This is the situation of things that we are 
now confronting. 

Well, from the beginning of His ministry, we have noted 
a steady movement toward the first of these, toward univer- 
sality of work and love and sympathy. In meeting His dead- 
liest temptation. He would commit Himself to nothing which 
should interpose the slightest bar to this. His interpretation 
of the law transcended every thing merely Jewish or ceremonial 
or conventional, and brought the spirit of the law home to the 
universal heart. Then as He went on, He whose very ideal of 
law had made the family so pure and sacred a centre of rela- 
tions, He outgrew the bounds of family; saying to His mother, 
"Woman, what have I to do with thee?" and when she with 
His brothers would confine Him to the tether of an earthly 
family, saying to all His hearers, ''Who is my mother? and 
who are my brethren?" Then stretching forth His hand 
toward His disciples. He said, ''Behold my mother and my 
brethren ! For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which 
is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister and mother." 
A harsh answer this has seemed to some, but only to those who 
would make their love an enclosure, in which regard for the 
little clique inside might be a motive for enmity or indifference 
to all others. Such exclusive love, as between man and wife, 
has been thus described in a most popular recent novel: 
"Yes," it is said of Simon Rosedale, "he would be kind . . . 
kind in his gross, unscrupulous, rapacious way, the way of a 
predatory creature with his mate." The Jewish feeling, you 
see, the law of the species sharpened to a point. The soul of 
Jesus, King of the Jews though He truly was, could not cramp 
itself to anything like this. For His love to man, patterned on 



254 "TtlE LIFE INDEED 

the love of God, was love absolute; so that if He loved His 
family, as He probably did and provided for them by His ac- 
tual labor till His thirtieth year, that fact only made Him love 
everybody else the better, according to the relation He could 
establish with men. Love, with Him, was not a family or 
parish or provincial matter ; it took account of no such bounds, 
but only of its own intrinsic motion, as free as the kindly offices 
of air and rain and sunshine, and as undiscriminating. So it 
went on; His consistency to this ideal always in control; so 
that when in His Messianic consciousness He spoke to the 
Sadducees, who deny resurrection, and described the resurrec- 
tion to which He and all His were bound, vv^e do not wonder 
that He corrected their materialistic cavils by saying, ^'Ye do 
err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For 
in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in 
marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven." The up- 
rise to which His life was directed was not an affair of the 
perpetuating of sexual and domestic matings ; there was enough 
in earthly ideals of love already to hallow these, if vitalized by 
the spirit; it was rather an uprise into the love that binds the 
universe of hearts together. And when, on that last sacred 
evening. He gives His little circle of disciples His parting 
words, it is of a piece with all the rest of His life that He says, 
"In my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so 
I would have told you; . . . and other sheep I have, which 
are not of this fold." He has become consciously the Head of 
the whole family in heaven and earth; and all their interests 
are dear to Him. Such has become His felt relation to the 
great spacious world, spreading out from where He stands and 
suffers and dies to the remotest corners; spreading out from 
the central luminary to the confines of darkness. Wherever 
the spirit of Christ is, there is the centre of things, and there 
the sheep of His pasture may be folded. It is not in the bounds 
of space, or nation, or family, or species, to interpose barriers 
to the limitless love of God, manifest in the flesh. His incar- 
nate Word to men. 

But just as He came, in His sense of Messiahship, to move 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 255 

consciously in the brotherhood of all the earth, so also He 
entered consciously into the brotherhood of all the ages; and 
here we aproach a strain of His life which as yet we can but 
dimly understand, nor can we understand it at all except as 
we know within ourselves the power of His resurrection. We 
can only note the strange indications, as did the bewildered 
disciples ; can note too, as we put data and data together, that 
all belong to a marvelous tissue of poetic justice. If a new 
life is to be constructed on His plan, and if it is the summit 
and crown of manhood life, we can truly say these wonders 
are strictly homogeneous with it; though they seem in calm 
sober sequence to have thrown down the barriers of death, 
and to have introduced man into the felt company of those who 
have gone before, as if they were present all the while, waiting 
only till we have eyes to see and life to appropriate. That pul- 
sation of the world love engenders its own consciousness of 
company and fellowship; and as it enlarges no past is past, 
but all its wealth of life is a perpetual present, as real as is the 
actual presence of our brothers on the other side of the world. 
This, I say, is hard to understand; for here in the flesh our 
eyes are still holden; but something like this is involved in 
Jesus' life from the Messianic recognition onward; He lives 
and acts and talks as if this were so. 

About a week after He had so solemnly impressed upon His 
disciples His mission of death and rising again and theirs of 
self-denial and cross-bearing, there came a wonderful mani- 
festation of the new order of life and relationship in which He 
was moving. It came to only three of the disciples, the three 
who, it would seem, stood nearest to the divine secret of His 
heart. He took them up into a mountain, and there He was 
transfigured — metamorphosed, the original word is — before 
them; and again in His history, as He stood there shining and 
glorious, with the luminous cloud above Him, were heard the 
words, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; 
hear him." Then the doors of the mighty past seemed all at 
once to stand wide open, and the eternal unseen was disclosed 
to mortal view, and Moses and Elijah were there, talking over 



256 THE LIFE INDEED 

the great things of life and death with Jesus, as if already He 
were of their company and in His own fitting home. They 
spake, St. Luke says, of His decease which He should accom- 
plish at Jerusalem; the thing which He had already told the 
disciples must needs be: His exodus, the word is, His going out. 
Noteworthy, is it not, that they did not speak of death; they 
gave this event another name, a new name perhaps, coined 
for the new thing. It was the same tremendous subject of dis- 
cussion which one of these disciples, Peter, afterward said had 
been the carefully studied theme of the ancient prophets, the 
crux of their prophecy; "searching what, or what manner of 
time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when 
it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory 
that should follow." No new theme this; it had been vital and 
paramount in the unseen places for centuries; and immortal 
beings were waiting in wondering suspense for the solution, on 
the eve of which the world seen and unseen was now standing. 
Here, among the immortals, was the very Spirit who had given 
them insight and foresight, speaking of the very event which 
so long ago had engaged their most amazed study. It was 
like a council of the holiest minds of the ages, planning for 
the crowning glory of the fully evolved manhood; as it were a 
kind of rehearsal and understudy of the supreme uprise, now 
so near at hand. That it meant something like this would 
seem to have been Jesus^ explanation of it; for you know He 
told the disciples to say nothing about it until the Son of man 
had risen from the dead, that they might have that event to 
interpret it by. 

The Transfiguration has all the elements of a clarifying, and 
surely much needed object-lesson. It seems to reveal the true 
situation and relation of things on the Christ scale: life and 
death, survival, immortality, resurrection, all seem here to fall 
into place and coordination as in no other event of Scripture. 
Of course there is an easy way to dispose of the whole matter, 
Professor Schmidt's way: to say that it never occurred, that 
it is a fancy picture. That kind of denial must have been 
urged long ago; for Peter takes pains afterward to say of this 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 257 

very event that it was actual fact, and that we have not fol- 
lowed cunningly devised fables. But this consideration apart, 
there is still the congruity and harmony, the poetic justice of 
the case, to be reckoned with; for as soon as we lift ourselves 
from material facts to that higher order and scale of events 
in which the whole life of Jesus and the whole history of man- 
hood evolution moves, this fits in perfectly as a natural and 
vital ingredient. It is as if for once we were reading the 
highest and deepest things of life from the inside, where we see 
at first hand the powers and motives that give it meaning. Let 
us see how this is. 

I well remember the feeling that came upon me when in one 
of the Passion Play years I entered the little village of Oberam- 
mergau. As I walked through the street, with its neat 
white-washed cottages, each with a picture of some scripture 
scene painted on its front, then saw the dominating parish 
church in one direction, and in the other, at the edge of the 
hamlet, the more dominating open-air theatre where the Pas- 
sion Play was given, and behind it all, like a guardian, the 
cross-crowned summit of the Kobelspitze, it was like being 
transported into another world, with all the feelings of life, 
its ways and motives and sentiments, suddenly made other. 
The noise of commerce was far away; and here among the hills 
a little community of peasants were feeding their souls year 
after year on that same prophetic and historic theme, "the 
sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow;" and the 
whole atmosphere of their little world was made sweet and 
calm by it. I wonder if it was not so, in truer reality and 
degree, on this mountain of Transfiguration, when the dis- 
ciples trembled as they entered into the cloud, and found the 
glory almost too great for their waking sense to endure. Yet 
it was a real world, and adapted to their souls; so restful and 
congenial that Peter wanted to make tabernacles and stay 
there. May it not have been a momentary unveiling, for love 
and humanity's sake, of what is always near, always present, 
waiting only till the Christ-formed manhood has eyes to see 



258 THE LIFE INDEED 

and heart to appropriate? How like it is to that vision of the 
supreme world-day which a poet has thus put into words : 

Soon the whole, 

Like a parched-up scroll, 
Shall before my amazed eyes uproll; 

And without one screen, 

At one burst be seen 
The presence wherein I have ever been. 

It were over-curious, perhaps, to assert this; but how fruitful 
the whole scene is of imaginings. And especially it sets us 
wondering whether, after all, the transition to the unseen world 
may not be a much less violent and catastrophic thing than our 
fears have figured; and whether it may not be in us so to live 
that all the likeness and congeniality of it, save the sudden 
rapturous moment of entrance, may already be full-formed in 
our nature. At any rate, here, to my mind, is the unending 
marvel of the scene: the chill and wrench of death is totally 
absent, unreal, abolished. As Tennyson expressed it of cer- 
tain trance-like states of his, death seems here an almost 
laughable impossibility; and yet this is no trance but a sane 
and matter-of-fact opening of the accessible realm where mor- 
tality is swallowed up of life. This is what the Transfigura- 
tion event looks like to me ; and as such it is not an exhibition 
or performance but a most weighty revelation of the signifi- 
cance of life. Here, if anywhere in the Bible, is unveiled the 
world eternally beyond death, beyond the bounds of time, and 
far within the encompassing limits of space and race and 
cramping custom. And an essential part of it is that strange 
mystic change of form, the same, it would seem, that St. Paul 
afterward calls the spiritual body which he regards as forming 
itself within us all the while, and which is just as real and con- 
gruous as the rest; a thing which he even dares to make the 
subject of a Christian command. "Be not conformed," he 
says, "to this world: but be ye transformed'^ — transfigured, 
metamorphosed, precisely the same word as used here — "by 
the renewing of your mind." Nor is it the mind alone that is 
concerned; for this command comes just at the heels of an 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 259 

injunction to present our bodies a living sacrifice, holy, accept- 
able unto God, which is our reasonable service. Can it be, 
then, that in a true sense transfiguration is in the list of the 
new life's duties, as if it were the most rational thing in the 
world for us, whose citizenship is in heaven, to seek those 
things which are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand 
of God? And have we not here a glimpse of the scenery and 
the company that we are in, just, as it were, beyond the violet 
rays of our spectrum? It is not for me to say; but such, in 
our grand poetic justice, seems to be the Bible assumption. 

Here we must pause to note another thing which seems here 
brought to light: a discrimination so momentous that we can 
only deem the event which makes it clear one of the greatest 
boons ever vouchsafed to a dimly-seeing humanity. If, as 
intimated, transfiguration and resurrection are correlative, ex- 
plaining each other, if here we are looking for once at the very 
core and article of eternal Hfe, then we see how distinct from 
it, nay opposed to it, are all men's vague notions of immor- 
tality, in the sense of a survival of soul, separate from the 
body. This is the thing that men have always dreamed of and 
psychic research is tr3dng to prove; fastening their eyes al- 
ways not on life but on death, as the necessary prelude which 
must somehow be resolved. Jesus had called people back from 
death; the young man at Nain, the daughter of Jairus; and in 
a few weeks he would do a more wonderful thing still, calling 
back Lazarus from his four days' entombment. But these were 
not resurrection; they brought no higher thing with them; 
they were only resuscitation. They are not in the class with 
this event at all. They left the resuscitated body still as 
mortal as ever; and all the process of dying had in time to be 
undergone over again. Our Lord did not set store by these 
miracles, as in any way enriching the sum-total of life. His 
ministry was otherwise directed; directed to an uprise of life, 
inner and outer, wherein there should be no separation and 
joining again, no ruins and subsequent repair, no wreck and 
dubious survival, but one integral wholeness of tissue and har- 
mony of progress and birth to the new range of being to which 



26o THE LIFE INDEED 

manhood is bound. By the side of this, even as here fleetingly 
glimpsed, how paltry appear men's crude notions of a piece- 
meal survival of death. His miracles of resuscitation from the 
dead serve a useful purpose, if only for the object-lesson they 
afford; we have in them something to set over against the 
larger reality; we can sense by them how small a part death 
plays in the grand total of evolutionary uprise. And here on 
Mount Hermon, far more truly than at the grave of Lazarus, 
here by His mingling with the great minds of the ages and by 
the revealed splendor which is so obviously His native element, 
He has vouchsafed to men a view of the summit to which the 
Son of man, bringing with Him the bidding for all men to hear 
and become with Him sons of God, has at length ascended. 
It is high; but humanity too is there, intact and glorious. 

The splendor of the hour faded, and when it was over the 
disciples again saw no man save Jesus only; but from this 
hour onward this wonderful event registered the true measure 
of Him. Henceforth, Head of the family in heaven and earth. 
He moved consciously among the eternal verities, lived and 
thought and spoke as to the manner born. His consciousness 
seemed to be enlarged in the time direction, as well as in the 
space direction. He spoke of Himself in terms deeper than 
human; calmly assumed to be contemporary with the men of 
old. ^'Verily, I say unto you," He boldly told the Jewish 
elders, ^^before Abraham was, I am." He met the Sadducees' 
denial of resurrection, and proved that resurrection is a pres- 
ent fact, by the truth, to Him as evident as the existence of 
God, that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob are alive. He spoke 
to Pilate of His kingly purpose in coming into the world, in 
just such terms as one uses who is moving in the consciousness 
of preexistence. We can little understand this now; we need 
the completed resurrection to explain it; but we can see the 
harmony of it with all the rest of His life, the poetic justice 
of the tremendous drama He was enacting. And is not that 
very grace and truth of His, so at one with the eternal mind 
of God, the clearest road to the realization of the mystery; 
may not a love so large have carried with it the timeless con- 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 261 

sciousness of eternal personality? Do we not even in our 
earthly love, when it reaches its purest expression in perfect 
union with another soul, have the sense of an eternal new 
world opening, and as if here were a pulsation from a limitless 
past? Of this sacred experience I may not speak out; I leave 
each of you to think how it has been in your own soul. In 
a recent play it has been put into question and answer ; where- 
in a poet, sensitive to the purest breath of love, comes to feel 
that his soul has found its perfect mating. ^'How old are you, 
Eugene?" he is asked. His answer is one that none of us will 
read as meaningless: ''As old as the world now. This morning 
I was eighteen." This sounds almost flippant, perhaps, by the 
side of our larger subject; but the supreme venture of history 
has labored to prove that love is as old as the world, and He 
who committed Himself to the proof speaks just as if He had 
entered into the secret of that consciousness. When we have 
fathomed the greatness of His Messianic personality we shall 
be slow to deny to Him the ability to say the word, "Before 
Abraham was, I am." 

While we are on this high ground, though we cannot now 
build tabernacles and stay, we must needs note one more thing. 
In the light of the evolution we have traced, with all its trans- 
cendent elements, this change of form into a spiritual body 
seems, and I think is revealed to be, the natural transition of 
the completed manhood from this earthly stage of being to the 
stage beyond. It is the way that is taken when death is 
abolished. It registers the supreme effect of the spirit of 
Christ on the whole life, body and all. He might have gone 
out that way; for already the gate stands open; it was the 
next step. His fulness of love had already proved too strong 
for death to handle; there was nothing for corruption and 
decay to lay hold of. It perfectly suits with the logic and fit- 
ness of things that this should have been the absorption of His 
life into the higher stage and element; the whole current of 
His being drew that way. Amazing as it may seem, this trans- 
figuration of Christ, so far from being a miracle, looks like 
the most natural and as it were scientific outcome of the his- 



262 THE LIFE INDEED 

tory we have traced. Its theoretical claims are satisfied. We 
could never have impeached His perfect sinlessness, His com- 
plete realization of manhood, His divine wisdom of word and 
work, if when Moses and Elijah vanished from men's sight, 
He too had vanished with them and been seen no more. If it 
were only law and merit and righteousness that He came to 
fulfil, here was the fitting crown and ending. 

But right here, though our thoughts of this story have 
mounted from height to dizzy height, we must reopen the case 
higher still, and note the thing which, as Browning phrases it, 
"shall crown him the topmost, ineffablest crown." All this 
opportunity to enter the fulness and glory of life He puts aside 
without regret, without flinching; His chosen way, the way to 
which His love for men points, is other. There below Him, 
all over the world, are men sinning, struggling, laboring, dying; 
even now, while He is standing beyond the reach of death, a 
hapless boy on the plain below is writhing in the full possession 
of "him that hath the power of death, that is, the devil," and 
no one, not even the disciples, can help him. But if He goes 
now, what of all these? If He goes now, how shall men lay 
hold on the same power of life that is in Him, and make it also 
their own? Something more is needed than that it shall 
be shown to them, and then, when its wonder is greatest, 
be withdrawn. He himself would not hold His life on such 
terms; and heaven would not be heaven to Him if the door 
were shut from any who were in uttermost need. So here, at 
the very door of light and peace and reward. He turns away, 
and goes down the mountain slope toward Gethsemane and 
Calvary. It is no more as if He had to die. This very scene 
has demonstrated that He does not have to die, that He has 
the power to escape the mortal lot of man. It is in the very 
consciousness of this power that He takes His life in His hand 
and offers it as a sacrifice on the cross. "I have power," He 
says, "to lay it down, and I have power to take it again." It 
is the freedom of truth that thus speaks; and in the light of 
this His obedience to the death of the cross acquires an in- 
effable grandeur. 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 263 

So though for merit's sake He might now receive His wages, 
for love's sake He will live out this human life to the ending, 
and sound the depths of all the experience that sinful man must 
sound. This death, being the supreme expression of love, has 
thus become an active principle of life, a thing taken and ap- 
plied to the salvation of the world. As He regarded it, it is 
like a seed sown in the ground, which by its very death and 
rising again bears much fruit. 

To what depths of spiritual suffering, to what abysses of the 
underworld of being this chosen road of death led Jesus, we 
can little know; we can only veil our faces before it. This 
aspect of His life presented itself to Him as like a cup which 
He must not only taste but drain to the dregs. Earlier in His 
ministry we hear Him asking His disciples, "Can ye drink of 
my cup?" and predicting that they shall do so, though they 
are so little aware what it means. But as He approaches the 
actual setting of the cup to His lips, it requires the utmost that 
is in His manhood to nerve Himself to it; it seems to be some- 
thing by the side of which standing before Pilate is almost an 
insignificant thing. The first shrinking of spirit from the tre- 
mendous thing before Him was shown when the Greeks came 
to inquire of Him, and get, so to say. His manifesto. His ac- 
count of what His mission meant. "Now is my soul troubled; 
and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour. But 
for this cause came I unto this hour." Then He went on to 
speak of the corn of wheat dying, and of His being lifted up 
from the earth; and as in the same connection He prayed, 
"Father glorify thy name," there came the third voice of ap- 
proval from heaven, as it had come before, at His baptism and 
transfiguration, "I have both glorified it, and will glorify it 
again." This was His last sign of the Father's approval; but 
as the awful gloom deepened it was enough; His spirit held 
out. We hear Him later praying in Gethsemane that if it be 
possible the cup may pass; but always with the addition of 
uttermost obedience, "Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou 
wilt." Then a few hours of indignity and silence and brave 
witness for the truth; then the crash of the nails through His 



264 THE LIFE INDEED 

feet and hands, and the prayer for their forgiveness; then that 
strange cry as from an unfathomable depth, ''My God, my 
God, why hast thou forsaken me?" We cannot understand 
it all; there is an uttermost of divinity as well as of humanity 
in it which stretches away beyond us and beyond our earth. 
We only know that it was in the road of what He freely chose 
to taste for men, and for every man; we know too that here 
on the cross, as put in words in Gethsemane, there was utter- 
most surrender of the human, with all its depths of life and 
love and faith, to the will of the divine. And in a few hours 
more the cup is drained, the spirit has survived its shrinking 
and conquered, and the final word is rereXecrrai, ''it is 
finished." 

When Jesus went down the transfiguration mountain toward 
Calvary, He went not only in love, a love which would leave 
no son of man out of His beneficence, but He went also in faith, 
just such faith as you and I have in something that we 
have not verified, and therefore do not know. He knew, by 
this touch of His glorification, that there was a way to the 
higher existence wherein death was abolished. He believed that 
that same higher existence was approachable through death, 
and to this belief, not as knowledge but as a sublime experi- 
ment. He committed Himself. That meant committal to all 
that it involved. His surrender to death was in just as good 
faith, and with as little experimental knowledge, as if death 
were to be utter extinction of being or the ending it seems to 
be. He said He had power to take His life again; but no man 
had done it, nor had He anything but His sublime faith to 
make the assertion on. After all, to surrender Himself thus 
to death was going into the black; it was a colossal venture of 
faith, a venture on the supreme vitalizing power of love. 

And as the apostles soon began to preach, the great com- 
mittal was fully justified; the venture, the experiment, proved 
its success and opened a new world of life and truth to men. 
Death wrought its worst on Him, in agony and suffering; but 
death could not hold Him. It had merely added one more in- 
gredient in His sum of holiest manhood life. When, a few 



THE SUPREME HISTORIC VENTURE 265 

days later, He appeared in another form to two of the disciples 
as they went into the country, His triumphant question to them 
was, ''Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to 
have entered into his glory?" He had made the mightiest 
venture that manhood had ever made, had sounded the ex- 
tremest depths of love and faith, had turned the doubtfulness 
and gloom of our human life into sunlit eternal certainty; and 
yet all this in the sanest and most self-evidencing way, the 
way that when it was seen must needs appeal to every true 
man. He had royally and consistently done what as Christ, 
as Son of man, He ought to do. 



VI 

NATURALIZING THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 

HOW T^IS SOLUTION OF THE LIFE PROBLEM WAS 
INTERPRETED TO THE WORLD 

I. Eye-witnesses of His Majesty 

11. Sinai versus Sion 

III. The Mustd of Saint John 

IV. The Mind of Saint Paul 



VI 

NATURALIZING THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 

THE most momentous single word ever spoken in 
this world, most momentous and most abysmally 
significant, was that last word spoken from 
the cross, rereXeo-rat; 'Tt is finished." We can never hope 
to comprehend more than one half of its meaning, until 
we are where we can see it from the other and 
inner side. It is the announcement of a great accom- 
plished fact, as great as the whole history and evolution 
of man; a fact on which through the growing ages God and 
man have been working together in a mighty partnership. On 
the evening before the word was spoken Jesus had said to the 
Father: ^T have glorified thee on the earth; I have finished the 
work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify 
thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with 
thee before the world was.'' Some colossal thing is recognized 
here which, even before Gethsemane or the arrest or the cruel 
execution, is already complete; what remains is only making 
it plain in the sight of men. Throughout the huddled scene 
of the cross too, as through the swift turmoil of arrest in the 
garden, there is on His part the same note of deliberateness, 
calmness, as of one who is bringing everything into final order, 
even down to the details of caring for His family and His fol- 
lowers. ''Of them which thou gavest me have I lost none," 
was His word about His disciples, fulfilled by His letting them 
go their way in Gethsemane; and you remember too how, when 
He had committed His mother to the beloved disciple's care. 
He knew then that all things were now accomplished, and re- 
ceived the vinegar and spoke the final word. About this going 
out which He accomplished at Jerusalem there was nothing 

269 



270 THE LIFE INDEED 

hurried or disordered, as if it were a catastrophe; no loose and 
ravelled ends of life and speech. It was the same on the third 
morning afterward, when the tomb was found empty; no 
marks there, as it were, of a sudden tumult of triumph, but 
the linen clothes lying neatly together and the napkin folded 
in a place by itself. From greatest things to smallest, the world 
could see not only a tremendous finished work but the minutest 
finishing touches, as if every proper and tasteful impulse of a 
finely touched nature would be satisfied. How that word ^'It 
is finished" seems to enlarge and expand, upward and down- 
ward and inward and outward, until it fills the horizon of the 
universe full. 

The great fact is now accomplished; Jesus names this in 
terms of glory. He had in all the lowly deeds of His life glori- 
fied the Father; the Father, answering at every step, down to 
the deepest and obscurest, but culminatingly in this final lifting 
up from the earth, had glorified Him. Here at last was the long 
event, emerging from the unseen places of the universe, in 
which God and manhood were in full harmony together, each 
revealing the plan that had eternally occupied his spirit, each 
seen as he is, in the central truth of universal being, in the 
unitary Life Indeed. You remember how St. John afterward 
described it: '^That which was from the beginning, which we 
have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have 
looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of 
life; (for the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and 
bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was 
with the Father, and was manifested unto us)." He seems to 
strain language almost to breaking-point to make apprehen- 
sible something which, for all its ineffable greatness, was yet 
so real here under the sun. The only word that can be used 
to name this, both on its earthly and heavenly side, is glory. 
Let us think of this word a moment. It is one of those words, 
of which there are not a few in Scripture, that have to be taken 
from men^s commonplace conceptions and vocabulary and 
crowded with new meaning to suit new and larger realities. 

I like to think of it in connection with that name which the 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 271 

Hebrew was somehow guided to give to God, and which you 
know became so sacred and withdrawn that he dared not pro- 
nounce it: the name Jehovah, or Jahaveh, which you know 
means, ''He who is,'' or "That which is." A pregnant and 
penetrative name this: the very discovery or invention of it 
was a kind of incentive to truth. For it always seemed to me 
as if what under this term the Hebrew was seeking and wor- 
shipping and trying to explore was just reality, the ultimate 
reality of things, that which is rather than seems, that which 
remains rather than changes or passes. The Hebrew mind, 
even in its devoutness and religion, was thus essentially like 
the scientific mind: it was set toward what is actual, true, lit- 
eral, real, and it valued finding that. Its bent of worship and 
belief, too, corresponded; for the Hebrew was looking always 
for signs, tokens, or as we may say effects, which would indi- 
cate what the reality is, and what the character of His work- 
ing; this is what St. Paul recognizes when he says the Jews 
seek after a sign; our Lord too appeals to the same national 
trait. What is the sign of the deepest reality of things, of the 
highest reality of life? In a true sense we may say the trend 
of the Hebrew genius was toward the answer to this question. 
And the name they gave to this sign or evidence of God's pres- 
ence or working, glory, started from the idea of weight or abun- 
dance or splendor. That is how they figured the glory of God, 
and perhaps the palpable values of life : splendor, the splendor 
of wealth and abundance and honor. If God should appear it 
would be in a splendor beyond mortal power to endure. The 
Greeks too had a word for glory, the word that the New Tes- 
tament employs; and this word, in its primal meaning, was 
accurately keyed to the mind of a people who, as St. Paul says, 
seek after wisdom, who are inclined to philosophize on things. 
It comes from the word to think or estimate; and to the 
Greeks the glory of God or of man is what we are to think of 
him at his best, truest, deepest, highest; what he is to be to 
our minds rather than our senses, when we fathom his being 
as it really is. When therefore Jesus glorified God, and God 
glorified Jesus, the splendor that the word glory gave to the 



272 THE LIFE INDEED 

idea was not merely an outward thing, an insufferable bright- 
ness, but an inward thing which could shine in the secret place 
of the soul, and which, equally real and true, could coexist 
even with ignominy and persecution and death, and could shine 
through the humblest deeds. The word had become large 
enough in Jesus' use of it, and He Himself so enriched its 
meaning, that He could say to the philosophizing Greeks that 
the Son of man was at that moment glorified when He was in 
act, like a corn of wheat, to fall into the ground and die that 
so an abundant harvest of the truest life might ensue. And a 
little while afterward, interpreting the same spirit of life, St. 
Paul promises nothing less than life eternal to those who by 
patient continuance in well-being seek for glory and honor and 
immortality. The glory of God, the glory of the Son of man 
— what we are to think of them in their beauty and brightness 
and essential truth, what they are in the light of the great ac- 
complished fact, and what in turn every man may strive to 
make his own — too evidently it is an unspeakably great re- 
ality that is revealed here. Can man bear the realization of 
it, and live? The Hebrew, in the thought of his sensuous image 
of glory, and his ingrained sense of sinfulness, would naturally 
doubt it. Or shall man not rather come to himself and then 
first begin to live, when he gets it into his mind as it really is, 
and appropriates if ever so little a pulsation of it? This was 
Christ's object, for which he lived and died. That same glory 
was a thing not to be exhibited alone; not to be wrought to 
complete manifestation and then withdrawn; but to be natural- 
ized and made the manhood way of living. Once come, it was 
to remain, accessible, available, fruitful and friendly for all 
human kind. 

There are some interesting signs that seem to show, even 
on the Hebrew conception, that this glory of the Son of man, 
both in its exaltation and in its abysm of suffering, had ele- 
ments too great for a mortal to bear; only a spiritual body, it 
would seem, could be equal to it. On the mountain of Trans- 
figuration, you remember, when the exceeding brightness came 
and Moses and Elijah appeared in glory, the three disciples 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 273 

were heavy, stupid with sleep, and could only bear it, as it 
were, in a waking dream. And again in Gethsemane, when the 
same glory was the glory of surrender to the utmost of the 
Father's will and the bitter cup, the same disciples, nearest 
and most intimate as they were, were cast into the same heavi- 
ness of slumber, and sensed it only imperfectly. "What! could 
ye not watch with me one hour? The spirit is willing, but the 
flesh is weak," was the word that expressed Jesus' hunger for 
companionship yet readiness to excuse them. There was some- 
thing transcending earth, and too much for the flesh to bear, 
even in the blackness of that experience; does it not flash forth 
the moment after, when, as soon as Jesus tells the approaching 
soldiers "I am he" they run backward and fall to the ground? 
They cannot lay hand on a being so glorious (though the out- 
ward rays are quenched in gloom and have become as it were 
actinic), until He gives them free permission. Other instances 
are given, where He walked through malignant mobs un- 
touched; and we recall how, in the splendor of His great re- 
solve to go up to Jerusalem and Calvary, the disciples were 
amazed at the grandeur of His presence. There were not want- 
ing flashes of splendor, the spiritual splendor of His native 
element, all along His earthly way; at the very beginning of 
His ministry, among His life-long neighbors and acquaintance, 
there is a touch of it, so that no hand can be laid on Him be- 
fore His time. Men can come to Him and be healed; can walk 
freely in the light and warmth of His gracious presence; but 
until the work is done, and His glory and their flesh are tem- 
pered to each other, no man can presume. "Touch me not," 
was His warning word to Mary, "for I am not yet ascended 
unto my Father." Yes: in all its phases men beheld His glory, 
and wherever seen it was the glory of the Life Indeed, full of 
grace and truth. 

We have seen what the accomplished fact, the result of the 
great historic venture was; we have traced its stages and its 
vital principles from the beginning; and great as it was we have 
found it a fact for men. There is indeed an element of it 
which can be wrought but once; nor need it be repeated. The 



274 "THE LIFE INDEED 

experiment of life once conducted in full, with all the condi- 
tions historic and other in typical place, and the problem is 
solved once for all; manhood vitalized by the spirit without 
measure, has reached the summit of its evolution, where life 
and death are its willing instruments, and the power of the 
tomb is abolished, and the way henceforth is resurrection and 
ascent to higher stages of being. From this time forth man 
may know the truth to which he may witness; and there will 
not be wanting many a martyrdom, and sufferings like those of 
Christ, and hardships eagerly undergone, that men may know 
Him and the power of His resurrection. But the one death 
that has been chosen as the sacrifice for all remains unique; 
the laboratory work of the Life Indeed has wrought its com- 
plete demonstration. But there remains now the work of 
making this great thing available; of sowing the spirit and 
faith of it among men; of making it the natural way of living. 
Fitting and motived as it was, it came with the shock of sur- 
prise; no one was prepared to see the venture come out so; 
it came to men bewildered, who must have time to take the 
things of Christ and piece them together; came to fisher-folk 
and publicans and laboring men, whom we do not select to 
be the wielders of ideas, but only the livers of humble life. 
And on such it devolved to set this accomplished fact in motion 
and make it the power of a kingdom. Through their life and 
words and work it must be naturalized, so that in time the 
conduct and sentiment and atmosphere of communities, yes, 
and the world, may take the principle and color of it. The 
centre of light and power is established among men ; the ques- 
tion now, so to say, is the question of output; how the life shall 
become the light of men. 



I. EYE-WITNESSES OF HIS MAJESTY 

"For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when 
we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, but were eye-witnesses of his majesty. For he 
received from God the Father honor and glory, when there 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 275 

came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, 'This is 
my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.' And this voice 
which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in 
the holy mount.'' These words, written by one who calls him- 
self "Simon Peter, a servant and an apostle of Jesus Christ," 
strike the keynote of the earliest and simplest announcement 
of the accomplished fact, the wonderful new thing that had 
come to the world and made itself known to the eyes and ears 
of men. It is just the kind of announcement that we should 
first expect, suited to plain people who want their Gospel plain; 
and just the mirror of a forthright, bluff, unmeditative mind 
such as the gospel history leads us to ascribe to St. Peter. 
There are no circumlocutions here, no posturings of philosophy, 
no manufacturing of fables, as if it were his business to put 
his explanations upon things. It takes its stand on the basis 
of simple concrete fact. The fact was so; we saw it; we heard 
it. How much the fact means, how it connects itself with 
our life and the ideas by which we have guided ourselves 
hitherto, is a thing for other heads to work out. St. Paul, for 
instance, is good at that sort of thing; he has made a study 
of it, ''and according to the wisdom given unto him hath 
written unto you." Some things that he writes are hard to be 
understood, and men that are not experts can easily misuse 
his words and turn them to their own hurt. But I have nothing 
to do with those deep things; they are beyond my unphilo- 
sophic fisherman brain; but I can tell you what I saw and 
heard; and plain man as I am, I was one of those who were 
chosen to be fishers of men, and one of the three who, for what- 
ever reason, were selected to be eye-witnesses of the highest 
majesty that human eyes could behold. 

Such is the honest, humble, perfectly transparent attitude 
assumed by the writer of this second epistle of Peter. In re- 
ferring you to it, I am not raising any questions about the gen- 
uineness of this epistle, or when it was written, or when it 
came unto the canon; I am concerned merely with what it says, 
and with the mind it reveals. As a matter of fact, you know, 
this is one of the epistles whose right critics question; in the 



276 THE LIFE INDEED 

general shaking-up of things that prevails nowadays they are 
so tangled up with what the church fathers say or do not say 
about it, and perhaps with its very primitiveness of tone, that 
the plain state of the case, the line of least resistance, seems 
to have lost its chance with them. St. Paul, you know, speaks 
of contemporaries of his who are ''ever learning and never able 
to come to the knowledge of the truth"; such possibilities 
still exist among men. And this at least may be said for it: 
it speaks accurately in character; it suits so well a man like 
St. Peter, and what would presumably impress him most, that 
we must hold the writer of it to have been either the man he 
professes to be or a consummate play-actor palming off an 
assumed personality on men in the interests of the holiest fact. 
It either carries its own transparent evidence, or is high in the 
rank of such literature as we ascribe to Shakespeare. 

All this, however, affects our real subject not one whit. For 
at any rate we have here, just as we have elsewhere, a true in- 
dication of what was the staple of the earliest preaching of the 
apostles, while still their message was a matter of plain fact, 
and before the ferment of philosophy and theology supervened. 
It was fact that the world needed to know; it was fact that 
these unlearned apostles gave them. Here was an event, the 
Transfiguration, with its interpretation vouchsafed straight 
from heaven; an event that by our Lord's own direction the 
three witnesses kept quiet until they had the resurrection to 
supplement it and interpret it by; and this event, with its still 
larger supplement, was what they began to announce just as 
soon as they understood it. The staple of the earliest Gospel 
was simply the wonderful news that a man who before all the 
world had been put to death was risen from the dead, was alive 
in the heavens, and was the same Lord of men's life and will 
that He ever was. Here was a new thing for the world to 
know: that we have a Guide and Teacher, One who has shared 
all our life and nature, in the bright region beyond death. 
Here is a new thing: that though He submitted freely to death, 
death could not hold Him. This, you remember, was Peter's 
own account of the matter, in his preaching at Pentecost: 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 277 

"Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by 
miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the 
midst of you, as ye yourselves also know: him, being delivered 
by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have 
taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: whom 
God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: but it 
was not possible that he should be holden of it." All the early 
preaching was like this: a statement of fact; an identification 
of this Jesus with the one whom the Jews well knew and had 
crucified; a testimony that He was a man perfectly just and 
holy, with the evidence of His divine spirit and power always 
with Him; and an assertion that this man was risen from the 
dead. Nor was the preaching confined to assertion of a past 
and accomplished fact. Here you see a present fact right be- 
fore you. Here is a community of men living a strange and 
new, enlarged and exalted life; a spirit of power and love has 
taken possession of them which connects with this same risen 
man; He is still at work healing diseases, forgiving sins, speak- 
ing as never man spake, infusing the divinest vitality into every 
heart that will welcome Him, just as He did in the flesh, yes, 
and more abundantly, because He is with the Father, the 
source and centre of all. Right from the world into which at 
His ascension a cloud received Him, the world where when we 
entered into the cloud we saw Him talking with glorified men, 
a world that is very near, nay, a world that comes into our 
souls, bringing tongues of flame for our speech, and vibrations 
of might for our hands, and motions of love for our hearts, and 
the very breath of joy and goodwill to intensify our life; right 
from this world come continual messages of good, and light 
and life are coursing back and forth, ascending and descending, 
as did the angels in Jacob's vision. The veil is rent; the bar- 
riers are down; all is one world now, seen and unseen; and the 
spirit of the divine is closer than breathing, and nearer than 
hands and feet. And this is just what has been prophesied, 
what from the days of the prophet Joel men have looked and 
longed for ; the Holy Spirit coming upon men and making new 
men of them; putting in them the full salvation, health, whole- 



278 THE LIFE INDEED 

ness of being, delivering them from the bondage of lust and 
sin, making them partakers of that eternal life of which the 
hour of transfiguration made us eye-witnesses, and which the 
resurrection redeemed from the fell empire of death. Such was 
their enthusiastic announcement; and let not the tremendous 
content and involvement of it blind us to the essential sim- 
plicity and forthrightness of it. It is not a theology that these 
plain men are bringing: it is a fact which has grown in form 
and beauty through a ministry and a death and a resurrection, 
and has orbed into reality and meaning until that same Jesus 
^'hath shed forth this which ye do see and hear." We have seen 
it all; have been confused and bewildered by it even to its un- 
expected outcome; but now we know what it is, and identify 
all its parts and stages, and cannot but speak of the things 
which we have seen and heard. 

So these apostles took hold of the strange new thing by the 
simplest handle, the handle of the actual and the real. To 
them it was first of all just what St. Paul called it afterward, 
the coming of life and immortality to light. St. Peter's forth- 
right mind, wherein there was only one vigorous leap from fact 
to conclusion, was just the mind to have the first dealing with 
it. In his explanation of the Pentecost event, you remember, 
he fastens at once on that prophecy of David's in the sixteenth 
psalm, where the psalmist's soul rests in hope that God will 
not leave him in the underworld nor suffer His holy one to see 
corruption. No more significant word of old could possily 
have been chosen; it is the most telling prophecy of immor- 
tality in the Old Testament. And this, he says, has come glori- 
ously true: the resurrection of Christ has put it into fact, and 
this pouring forth of the Holy Spirit has put it into power, a 
gift of life for all men. It is now actually in the world, a real 
and available thing, to be domesticated and naturalized in the 
common life of men. 

The name that the apostles forthwith gave to their message, 
and that covered its whole essential content, corresponded ac- 
curately to this simple conception of it: it was evayyiXiov^ 
"good news," the report of a radiant new fact from heaven, new 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 279 

boon for earth. When they chose a new man to announce it, 
Matthias, so that their number twelve might be made intact 
after the defection of Judas, they chose him because he too had 
been an eye-witness of the resurrection, and therefore could 
testify to fact and tell the good news at first hand. And their 
manner of telling it was preaching, not arguing or philosophiz- 
ing but just proclaiming ; the foolishness of preaching, St. Paul 
calls it; but it was the direct way of bringing fact to men, a 
simple report of the actual, sowing concrete fact among men 
and letting it work as it would. That was enough for them 
to do; that contained its own power. For, as George Eliot puts 



For Fact, well-trusted, reasons and persuades, 

Is gnomic, cutting, or ironical, 

Draws tears, or is a tocsin to arouse — 

Can hold all figures of the orator 

In one plain sentence; has her pauses too — 

Eloquent silence at the chasm abrupt 

Where knowledge ceases. 

Out of the fact that manhood is risen from the grave, such 
full-orbed manhood as we have seen with our eyes and our 
hands have handled, comes all the light of life. 

Now I have dwelt on this aspect of the case because it cor- 
responds so precisely with the quasi-scientific view of things 
which we have regarded the Bible as taking as the grand text- 
book of life and immortality. We have looked at Christ's life 
as a supreme historic venture, a laboratory work of love and 
faith, the most colossal scientific experiment that was ever un- 
dertaken and carried to the profoundest depths. No element 
of the problem was evaded or omitted. When He went down 
the slope of Hermon toward the cup of Gethsemane and the 
agony of the cry, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani," He was ap- 
proaching the very abysm of being, infinitely farther than we 
could follow, where prophets and angels could only look in 
wonder. And now this announcement of fact is an announce- 
ment that the trem.endous experiment has issued in complete 
success. The long laboratory work of the ages, the long wit- 



28o THE LIFE INDEED 

nessing of the spirit of God with the spirit of man, has at the 
fulness of the time completed its work of growth and freedom ; 
manhood has wrought its redemption through the law of the 
spirit of life; and the doors of the higher evolution stand wide 
open. The plain visible fact of the light of day has joined 
hands with the large ongoings of heaven and earth, and men 
have discovered the identity. 



II. SINAI VERSUS SIGN 

So the accomphshed fact, as soon as resurrection and as- 
cension set the seal to it, became forthwith a fact not past but 
present; it was a new dynamic in humanity; and from this 
time forth, as the wonders of the day of Pentecost proved, men 
could avail themselves of the same power of life which had 
raised Jesus from the dead. The power was abroad in the 
world: it was transforming and transfiguring men inwardly, 
was healing disease and delivering from sin. The apostles were 
not only eye-witnesses of His majesty; they were also reposi- 
tories of the same spirit and vitality which had burst forth in 
glory at Mount Hermon and come forth as a risen body from 
the tomb; and they were ambassadors from this same court of 
glory, where the Son of man sat, the unseen Lord of their wills, 
yet with them always. I need not stay now to note how this 
same dynamic of life enlarged on the apostles' hands ; how our 
straight-minded energetic apostle St. Peter discovered through 
a vision, in which among all the creatures of God he discerned 
nothing common or unclean, and through actual bestowal of 
the Spirit, that the power of life worked as well with heathen 
as with Jews, and that "of a truth . . . God is no respecter 
of persons, but in every nation he that feareth him, and 
worketh righteousness, is accepted with him." This finished 
work, this accomplished fact, of which the apostles were in 
charge, and which was proving so growing and vital, was also 
a universal fact; it belonged to man as man, not to man as 
Jew, nor merely to man whose heredity had prepared him for 
it in one way. It was limpid, pervasive, adaptable, suited to 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 281 

any inherited range of ideas, remedial for any incurred cor- 
ruptions or errors of life ; this it showed by its large beneficent 
effects on Gentiles and Jews alike. So, just like a scientist who 
has discovered a new appliance for healing or comfort or labor- 
saving, and who desires to make its usefulness as widespread 
as possible, just in that same goodwill spirit, St. Peter and 
the rest are concerned to spread and naturalize the workings 
of this new life among men, among all men. 

But it has been brought to light and power through the his- 
tory of one nation, and through one man who has proved Him- 
self not only Son of man but king of that nation, who on the 
cross where He laid down His life bore the inscription, for all 
the world to see, 'J^sus, the King of the Jews." That nation 
had its peculiar body of traditions, its long line of energies and 
histories and laws and ceremonials and literature; to which 
Jesus Himself had conformed all His life, and which was in 
the very blood and bone of the apostles. As our Lord Himself 
had said, salvation is of the Jews; and when He brought heal- 
ing to the Syro-Phenician woman, it was under the recognized 
figure of sharing the children's bread with dogs. All these pe- 
culiar Jewish ideas must now be brought into line with the 
great new fact; all was one tissue and consistency; all must 
be brought over from the theory and imagery in which hitherto 
it had existed, from the ideals of life which for so many cen- 
turies had been men's culture and educative power, and fas- 
tened on this colossal fulfilment and culmination. The Hebrew 
nation had been, as it were, living through a grand allegory of 
life, in which customs, and temple- worship, and sacrifices, and 
orders of priesthood, and prophetic promises had all embodied 
symbols of things to come; like a minutely articulated body of 
theory and poetic image, which sometime was destined to melt 
into the actual and literal. No nation ever lived on earth which 
was so truly and thoroughly a prophetic nation; its whole body 
of inner ideas was an articulated promise and symbol of things 
to be. 

Accordingly, the very first thought that sprang into the 
apostles' minds, when they came into possession of the accom- 



282 THE LIFE INDEED 

plished fact, was the thought of identification. How does this 
fact fit in with the facts and prophecies which we already have, 
which our history has bequeathed to us? As soon, you re- 
member, as St. Peter, in that second epistle, avers that we were 
eye-witnesses of His majesty, he goes on to say we have also 
a sure word of prophecy, sure because it has all come true, and 
that prophecy came through the same Holy Spirit moving the 
hearts of men of old, and that prophecy is no monopoly of 
Jews, is not of private interpretation, as if any people or age 
could appropriate it and rejoice in their exclusiveness. It is 
capable of being made true for all; its lines have indeed been 
wrought out in one nation, but, once fulfilled and established, 
it is a boon universal. 

If this is the case, we would naturally expect that out of 
the plexus and tangle of Jewish ideas, clear and obvious 
enough to them but meaningless to the great body of the 
heathen, the promulgators of the accomplished fact would 
bring out some large idea, simple and plain for all men to see 
and appropriate. For the Jews this truth must be comprehen- 
sive enough to take into order and relation all the system of 
life that they carry in mind; but for Gentiles and Jews to- 
gether, who henceforth must have the keeping of it, it must 
emerge into a large rounded statement, which will be just as 
great and cogent, and satisfy all the premises of the case, 
though these premises be not Jewish, and indeed though 
heathen come to it out of darkness and with no formed theories 
of life at all. What statement of truth shall be large enough, 
simple enough, self-evidencing enough, to satisfy these condi- 
tions ; being at once the accurate fulfilment of all that the past 
has symbolized and promised, and a present pulsation and 
power wholly beyond dependence on a peculiar past? The 
answer to this question, along with their simple announcement 
of good news, was the literary problem that first confronted 
the apostles. It resolved itself into the question how all this 
strange new truth of Hfe laid hold of past and present, fulfilling 
prophecy and at the same time giving prophecy its final dis- 
charge. 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 283 

The Epistle to the Hebrews contains perhaps the most 
thorough and detailed solution of this part of the apostles' 
problem, the stage of teaching that came next after the first 
plain gospel announcement. It is full of scripture quotation; 
it takes up the salient points of prophecy and shows how truly 
and broadly these are fulfilled; it runs over the Jewish temple 
system of sacrifice and tithes and priesthood, and shows how 
a great High Priest has at last come and offered such a sacri- 
fice that no bulls and goats need more be slain, nor altars 
erected, nor inaccessible holy places be veiled off from men; 
for He has entered into the holy place once for all, with all 
our difficulties and temptations upon Him, bravely and sin- 
lessly overcome, with righteousness actually earned and obedi- 
ence learned through suffering, with our human nature com- 
pletely rounded out and finished; so that henceforth there is 
nothing higher to look and languish for, but now our anchor, 
our hope is within the veil. Then there is that longing for rest, 
which all the Hebrew wilderness history so ingrained in them, 
and which their exiles and tossings about among the nations 
through all their turbulent career so accentuated; all that is 
satisfied now, after so many days had been set for it and passed 
without fulfilment; all has come true and real now; we which 
believe do enter into rest. Then there is that prophecy of the 
essential greatness and supremacy of man, and how God had 
put all things under his feet; that too has come true. True, 
we see not yet all things put under him; but we see Jesus, 
made in the same way and loyal to the same nature; and we 
see Him for the suffering of death crowned with glory and 
honor. There is where manhood is now, in heaven, sharing 
the dominion of all things in the power and love of God. 

I must not stay to trace all the details of this enthusiastic 
interpretation of things. It amounts, I think, to this: that 
the writer is laboring to show how, in this radiant accomplished 
fact, all the drag and burden is taken off from life, and how 
now the soul of man, in full sight of his goal, is free to leap 
forward into larger and fuller being. His redemption is fin- 
ished; his sacrifice accomplished and the austere altar-fires 



284 THE LIFE INDEED 

forever put out; he is at the beginning of his true life, with the 
glorious race all before him; all that remains is to lay aside 
weights and sins and spring forward unimpeded and free, run- 
ning with patient staying-power the race that is set before him, 
running toward Him who has already run the same race and 
is waiting to welcome him to the throne where He sits. And 
here, compassed about with a great cloud of witnesses, unseen 
perhaps but seeing and noting all, he stands in the morning of 
the times, ready to run and overcome. 

Another thing is noteworthy. We are inveterately accus- 
tomed to look toward the unseen future as if it were all a 
dream, a doubt, a grand perhaps; there is a painful lack of 
anything that we can commit ourselves to as real, we do not 
take things for granted. The whole course of this epistle is 
from dreams to realities; the unseen home to which all these 
energies and promises pointed is regarded as an actual present 
fact. The cloud of witnesses out of all the ages and lands are 
even now present, compassing us about; there they are, so to 
say, just beyond the violet rays of our spectrum, but still in 
the spiritual actinic rays, watching to see us run our race and 
play our part well. "For," as St. Paul says, "we are made a 
spectacle, a theatre, unto the world and to angels, and to men." 
That being man, who for a little while and for a noble purpose 
was made a little lower than the angels, has learned in what 
company and to what end it is given him to play this earthly 
part. There is no more any austere veil, no real separation of 
heaven and earth. You remember who those witnesses are. 
They are the ones described in the eleventh of Hebrews, the 
heroes of faith in all ages, who in their time had the substance 
of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen; and yet 
whose life was simply going forward to do the next thing, 
striving in dimness but never in doubt, and always dying with- 
out having obtained what they sought. "They which say such 
things," says the writer, "declare plainly that they seek a coun- 
try," a home of the soul. And now the home they sought, 
which even after their death remained as incomplete to them 
as life in the old dispensation of things was to us, has received 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 285 

its crowning finish; and it is all one commonwealth, the whole 
family in heaven and earth united in one redemption. The 
seen and the unseen departments of it went forward together; 
and the better thing that was provided for us was "that they 
without us should not be made perfect." It is wrong to figure 
them as transferred to a dreary Sheol, where existence is only 
a standstill and arrested development; equally wrong to deem 
their life remote from and uncoordinate with ours; the new 
order of things has made such crude ideas of immortality im- 
possible. The self-same redemption, the self-same energies 
of life, the self-same order of the spirit, obtain there as here, 
and here as there; nay, and because our citizenship is in 
heaven, the making and organizing and beautifying of heaven, 
the wise promotion of its welfare as a commonwealth, is as 
truly in our hands as in hands unseen. How luminous and 
reasonable a conception this has become, and how it draws 
the vast universe into unity and order. It is a marvelous pic- 
ture of the new consciousness that came to find place in men, 
after they had got a glimpse of the reality of things in the 
holy mount, and had seen the great ones of old actually in 
consultation, and came by the way of resurrection and the 
Pentecostal spirit to realize what it meant. For ye are not 
come to Mount Sinai, with its threats and its lightnings and 
its paralyzing influence of terror and dread; but ye are come 
to Mount Sion, where all around you, present and aware, are 
the unnumerable company of angels and men, and Jesus, who 
has wrought to found and finish it all, and the spirits of just 
men made perfect. For by all these agencies and histories and 
experiences of the undying spirit, whose past and future alike 
record forever the vitality of faith, God hath prepared a city, 
a new Jerusalem, and He who sits on the throne of it says, 
"Behold, I make all things new." 

III. THE MIND OF SAINT JOHN 

All this, we will bear in mind, is how this new dynamic of 
humanity looked to simple-minded people; who if they saw 



286 THE LIFE INDEED 

things with elemental vividness, saw them as straight palpable 
fact, and without the warpings and glamours of a preconceived 
philosophy; this was their first deduction, as they felt the 
thrill of a new life, and identified it with the continuous and 
pervasive resurrection power of their Master. It was in the 
providence of the Father of spirits that this tremendous thing 
should be submitted first to the keeping of sincere and virgin 
minds; for there was its universal home, which every lowliest 
one could share in, and there was the clear nucleus of concep- 
tion from which, as time and experience went on, should pro- 
ceed all the applications to whatever complexities of life. 
''Blessed are the pure in heart," said Jesus — the word, you 
know, is simple, one-folded, what the Germans call einfdltig 
— "for they shall see God"; they it is whose spirit is best fitted 
to identify these transcendent elements of life and refer them 
to their true source; they, the weak things of the earth, can 
by this endowment confound the mighty. This corresponds 
to the effort of our Lord's whole ministry; which was directed 
to simplicity, one large and lucid unity of spirit controlling the 
whole being of man. "One thing is needful," he once said to 
Martha, not the many things that distract one with care and 
worry, but the one totality of ideal, the good part which Mary 
has chosen and which nothing can take away. The realization 
of this came from His early Nazareth years; His brother and 
childhood companion James, you know, when he in turn came 
to teach men the things of the new life, warned them against 
being double-minded. And the whole process of naturalizing 
the accomplished fact, corresponding to this initial realization 
of it, was a simplifying process. It struck out straight for the 
largest and most comprehensive facts of being, in which all 
the others are framed and environed: the varied pageant and 
arena of life, the unescapable lot of death. How by this new 
thing life is illumined, enlarged, enriched; how death is van- 
quished, disenvenomed, abolished; — such is the spacious and 
inclusive effect to which this access of good news, this success- 
ful venture, reduces. St. Paul got it accurately right, after 
all, when he summed it up in the words which so many times 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 287 

come into our theme: ''who hath aboHshed death, and hath 
brought Hfe and immortahty to light through the gospel." The 
light of life is here, our biometer and unit of measure; all that 
remains, and that is a thing for world and eternity to compass, 
is to explore and assimilate and disseminate it. 

It is interesting to note in what sturdy, concrete, matter-of- 
fact way these Galilean apostles set about accomplishing this 
great new object to live for. One and all, they made it a 
matter of the spirit, that initiative in man whose history we 
have traced from twilight to noonday; but the spirit they recog- 
nized was not an abstraction or a theory, but a present Person 
and Helper^ who was witnessing with their spirits, and who in 
every juncture was taking of the things of Christ and showing 
to them, showing them also things to come. Equally also in 
a negative way, the spirit that they were moved to resist stood 
out as a concrete foe to fight. The writer to the Hebrews, you 
remember, so vividly aware of the long Jewish history, in which 
through fear of death men were all their lifetime subject to 
bondage, makes Christ's great act in taking flesh and blood 
an act undertaken "that through death he might destroy him 
that had the power of death, that is, the devil." If the power 
of death reduces to Satanism, then here is a plain element of 
personality on which to concentrate our fightings and antipa- 
thies; we have found the vulnerable point in the very 
king of terrors. No obscured issue here; no diffusion of evil 
and death all through our system ; we know in what spirit and 
personality the power of death resides, and can direct our 
forces to that point. So likewise St. James, writing to the 
early communities of dispersed Jewish Christians, says, "Re- 
sist the devil, and he will flee from you"; and our sturdy St. 
Peter, figuring the foe as a roaring lion ranging for prey, bids 
men resist him stedfast in the faith. St. John makes the 
matter equally definite: the Son of God, he says, was mani- 
fested that He might destroy the works of the devil; and St. 
Paul, mindful of the inner subtleties of the conflict, warns his 
readers that Satan has changed his tactics and has trans- 
formed himself into an angel of light. I am not sure that we 



288 THE LIFE INDEED 

have gained greatly by letting our notions of spiritual issues 
grow dim and abstract; perhaps for this very reason the re- 
bellious, negative, denying spirit that is so prone to invade the 
hearts of us all is all the more free to gain a foothold and give 
too controlling tone to our life. There is power in the plain 
instinctive resolve to define evil in personal terms, and hold 
him as an alien outside our personality. When Jesus Himself 
begins His career by going up into the wilderness, driven by 
a holy spirit, on purpose to try issues with the devil, and when 
in an absolute instinct of antipathy He says, ''The prince of 
this world cometh, and hath nothing in me," we feel that He 
is fully as well armed against spiritual atrophy and death as 
we, in our vague double-minded speculations, are likely to be. 
There is real advantage in bringing the large issues of life to a 
point where not only our mind, but as it were our senses, can 
lay hold on them. It is the impulse of simple-minded men, 
like these early disciples; and if we continue straight-seeing 
we do not outgrow it. You remember how Tennyson has made 
this very concreteness of insight, with its natural connotation 
of religious forms, the basis of a warning addressed to those 
who pride themselves on a more abstract and philosophical 
faith. 

thou that after toil and storm 
Mayst seem to have reach'd a purer air, 
Whose faith has centre everywhere, 

Nor cares to fix itself to form. 

Leave thou thy sister when she prays, 

Her early Heaven, her happy views; 

Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse 
A life that leads melodious days. 

Her faith thro' form is pure as thine. 

Her hands are quicker unto good: 

Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood 
To which she links a truth divine! 

See thou, that countest reason ripe 

In holding by the law within. 

Thou fail not in a world of sin. 
And ev'n for want of such a type. 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 289 

There is a kind of common sense about this putting of our 
spiritual struggles and achievements into common-day terms 
and forms that somehow appeals to our admiration; it makes 
our deepest life an affair of our work and our visible world. 

I am taking a peculiar way, you will perhaps urge, in set- 
ting out to describe what I have proposed, the mind of St. John; 
but perhaps the way is not so indirect, after all. For he too 
is in this same trend of simplification; his preeminent charac- 
teristic is, that he goes straight to the supreme issues of life 
and death, faith and conduct, spirit and impulse, without in- 
tervening glamours and colorings; defines terms in their ulti- 
mate values. What makes his views of life so deep is not that 
they are less simple than those of others, but that they are 
more simple : they have the large, boundless simplicity of truth 
absolute. But they are set squarely in the higher key and 
idiom. To him the life of Christ was no longer the life of a 
Galilean artisan whose venture of love and faith had such mar- 
velous results; it was the life of the Son of God, nay, it was 
the Word made flesh and tabernacling among us; and what 
we beheld in Him was the glory as of the only-begotten of the 
Father, full of grace and truth. The life that was in Him, 
therefore, was the life absolute, pulsating with one vitality both 
divine and human; and that life is the light of men, illumi- 
nating and irradiating all the spirit and power that belongs 
essentially to human life. If we would see what God would 
be like, as expressed in terms of flesh and blood, here it actu- 
ally is, moving among men for them to see and hear and handle, 
appealing to men for their belief and worship and obedience. 
We beheld His glory; the ideal has become real; the God 
whose supreme unpronounceable name is reality, He who is, 
has spelled His name in the letters of human life, has expressed 
His nature in the terms of human deeds, and now we have 
but to look at it and see if it is not so. The interest that we 
take in such an Object is not the interest of past history, with 
its details of time and place ; not primarily the interest of wise 
teachings and precepts of conduct; it is the interest of coming 
face to face with the divine, and therefore of coming to the 



290 THE LIFE INDEED 

very centre and spirit of our own true life. 'These are 
written," he says of the signs of his gospel, "that ye might be- 
lieve that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that be- 
lieving ye might have life through his name." All this, you 
see, deep as it is, is just the far-reaching depth that inheres 
in a luminous transcendent fact, recognized as the greatest fact 
that can smite itself into the life and history of men. It dis- 
engages the fact, so to say, from its accidents of time and place 
and nation and custom ; and instead of putting details together 
and reasoning upon them and like the centurion deducing, 
'Truly this was the Son of God," it treats the deduction as 
already made; or rather, it takes the fact as so obvious, so 
accordant with our highest ideals, that it does not need to be 
submitted to logic and reasoning at all, it is its own evidence, 
and needs only to be seen. Here is more than a historical fact, 
more than a body of teaching, more than a ministry of signs 
and wonders; here is the life absolute, the Life Indeed. In a 
word, the mind of St. John, as revealed through his gospel and 
epistles, is an intuitive mind, which sees the truth of things 
at first hand, and needs no crutches of logic or philosophy to 
evidence it or support it; a mind which ignores preliminary 
processes of getting at truth, and fastens at once on the abso- 
lute conclusion of the whole matter. So its view of the accom- 
plished fact is not a deduction from visible premises; rather it 
is like a large and self-evidencing vision. 

Such a mind employs its own vocabulary, corresponding to 
its own peculiar scale and range of conceptions. To under- 
stand it, and to share our ideas with St. John's, we must move, 
so to say, in his atmosphere, must realize the scenery of his 
super-earthly, absolute world. It is like conforming our 
imagination to the ideas of a poet, in order to get the values 
of his poetry. 

Wer den Dichter will verstehen 
Muss in Dichters Lande gehen, 

is Goethe's way of expressing it. 

Who the poet will understand, 
He must go to the poet's land. 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 291 

But when we get there, and when we think ourselves into the 
world of St. John, we find his ideas homogeneous, correlated 
and coordinated with each other, and accurately adjusted to 
his large conception of things. He moves in his world as 
simply and naturally as we in ours. That the things of Christ 
look differently to him from the other gospel writers, and that 
he has recalled other and deeper strains of Christ's teaching, 
is perfectly consistent with the fact which Jesus said would 
accompany the coming of the Spirit, namely that the Spirit 
would take the things of Christ and show them to men, bringing 
all things to their remembrance; the difference is, that St. John 
apprehends the central spirit of Christ's being more intimately, 
more at first hand, more according to the sacred ideal which, 
being the holiest and secretest thing in Jesus' life, would nat- 
urally be divulged only to the most sympathetic insight. So 
his memory and interpretation of things is more penetrative; 
he reports what he has had the inner ear to hear and the closer 
intimacy to gather. Thus it is that the Bible places him be- 
fore us; he was the disciple whom Jesus loved. And the things 
he draws from the treasury of Christ are all in keeping with 
this conception of him; not a line out of character or out of 
perspective. The poetic justice of the case is complete. The 
mind of St. John, you know, is the battle-ground of the myopic, 
unpoetic, unspiritual critics; they deem that such a way of 
portraying the Life Indeed must have taken about two centuries 
to evolve, and that men could not come to think so until they 
had poked their prosaic noses into gnostic books and Neo- 
Platonic books and the speculations of Philo and the maun- 
derings of pedants and book-worms. It is a curious example of 
how each man imputes himself; that is the only way they can 
conceive of getting at the involvements of a transcendent truth, 
because it is their way. But this report of Jesus does not look 
like the sort of thing that you get out of parchment and phi- 
losophy; it is too vitally inwoven with the inmost fibre of 
Christ's life for that. The scripture account of the case is 
more natural, more in the line of least resistance, when it says, 
"This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote 



292 THE LIFE INDEED 

these things: and we know that his testimony is true." And if 
it be objected that such deep views of life are beyond the scope 
of a fisherman from Galilee, — well, the deepest soundings of 
human nature that literature has given us were not beyond 
the plummet of a youth from Stratford-on-Avon, whose words 
for three centuries have remained the standing enigma of the 
prosaists who would account for them; and have we less data 
to work on here, in a pure-hearted young man who at the 
very beginning of Jesus' ministry was asking ''Rabbi, where 
dwellest thou?" who was with Him in the holy mount and the 
mysterious garden, who leaned on His breast at supper, and 
who never denied or deserted Him in His uttermost extremity? 
Put such a man, no matter if he hasn't a university degree, a 
man imbued with his nation's purest ideas, a man of immedi- 
ately apprehensive, penetrative, intuitive mind, a man of 
Boanerges' temperament ready to call down fire from heaven 
on any spirit that would not yield instant faith and allegiance, 
put such a man before the majestic pageant of life that was 
unfolding itself there in Palestine, the greatest venture of the 
manhood spirit that ever was enacted; and would it take him 
two centuries to apprehend what it meant? Whenever these 
words of John were written, we have them to reckon with and 
account for. Are they likelier to have come by the slow, grop- 
ing, deductive way, the way of the library and parchment and 
the dust of subterranean scholarship, or by the way that Scrip- 
ture itself grounds and avers, the flash of rapturous discovery 
and intuition? It is not a mere question of how and when all 
this got into the canon; that is the least significant part of it. 
It is rather the question of eyes to see and a mind to appre- 
hend and interpret. And I find the matter no more difficult, 
as attributed to the son of Zebedee, fisherman though he was, 
than is an analogous fact, as attributed in modern times to 
the son of a wool-dealer John Shakespeare ; and the way seems 
far clearer than the way which pushes it two centuries away, 
into the dullest period of our annals. It shows us the Life In- 
deed w^orking an immediate, not postponed effect; or postponed 
at least only until the ripened mind of the aged St. John could 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 293 

assemble its recollections, and coordinate them, and weave 
them in with their transcendent meanings. That is the way 
the Scripture represents it: John's gospel, the latest written, 
coming in to supplement men's too narrow views and correct 
their myopic errors. You remember how Browning, in his 
poetic portrayal of St. John's death-bed, puts into words his 
account of the case: St. John is represented as speaking of the 
storm of doubts and objections that raged round his old age, 
clamoring for explanation and craving for new and more cogent 
grounds for faith. 

I never thought to call down fire on such, 

Or, as m wonderful and early days, 

Pick up the scorpion, tread the serpent dumb; 

But patient stated much of the Lord's life 

Forgotten or misdehvered, and let it work: 

Since much that at the first, in deed and word. 

Lay simply and sufficiently exposed, 

Had grown (or else my soul was grown to match. 

Fed through such years, familiar with such light. 

Guarded and guided still to see and speak) 

Of new significance and fresh result; 

What first were guessed as points, I now knew stars, 

And named them in the Gospel I have writ. 

It is an old man's recollections, but also an old man's long- 
seasoned insight and wisdom; not only the memory, ranging 
over the three wonderful years of its richest field, but the clear- 
seeing, meditative, intuitive mind of St. John. 

All of St. John's words correspond accurately to this cast of 
mind. The most salient characteristic of them is the note of 
absoluteness that pervades them; they deal with truth abso- 
lute, they speak in its idiom. To him the reality that has come 
in to iill the world of manhood is not the promise of salvation, 
or prophecy of an eventual life eternal, but just life, without 
modification or limitation, life absolute and full-orbed, pul- 
sating through worlds seen and unseen alike. ''I am the life," 
he makes Christ say, not am working to secure it; and accord- 
ing to this conception he defines life: ''This is life eternal," he 
reports Jesus as saying to the Father, ''that they might know 
thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." 



294 "^HE LIFE INDEED 

All the elements of man's existence and duty he states not in 
terms of process or struggle or slow cure of sin or gradual 
growth, but as it were in terms of completed evolution. The 
world he habitually moves in is the world risen with the per- 
fected life of Christ. He it is, you know, who reports the con- 
versation with Nicodemus, wherein is revealed the necessity 
and nature of the second birth; from him it is that we have the 
conversation with the woman of Samaria, wherein man's wor- 
ship of God is defined as the spontaneous impulse of spirit and 
truth, and man's true power in the world as like that of a 
well of water, pouring forth cheer, and refreshing, and spring- 
ing up into everlasting life; from him the pregnant words 
about making the will of God our meat and drink, and know- 
ing of the doctrine by willing what God wills, and obtaining 
freedom of spirit by knowing the truth. He it is who pre- 
serves to us Jesus' supreme declaration of His purpose in 
coming into the world, that He might be king of men by bear- 
ing witness to the truth ; and he it is who records those wonder- 
ful words of counsel and explanation and prayer by which on 
that last sad evening He would adjust their souls to the coming 
crisis, leaving with them His joy and peace, that their joy 
might be full. All belongs to the homogeneous idiom, the de- 
tailed exploration, as it were, of manhood life as an absolute 
rounded thing, a solved problem, beyond the invasion of bond- 
age and error and sin. It is what life is, adult and fully 
evolved; we could not conceive it higher or essentially other, 
though it were transferred to heaven. Here is the Life Indeed, 
which through so many centuries of dimness and struggle and 
growth has been advancing to fulness and rounded truth of 
being. 

Now we must not omit to note, as we pass along, to what 
simplicity of terms, after all, these tremendous ideas are re- 
duced. This is not the abstract interpretation of a gnostic 
theologian but the forthright conception of a sincere Galilean, 
telling us of another Galilean's life and innermost ideas. The 
very figures he uses are startling, sometimes almost repulsive, 
in their plainness. St. John it is, you remember, who preserves 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 295 

to us that cannibal conception of eating the flesh and drinking 
the blood of the Son of man; no philosopher in the world, we 
may roundly say, would ever have put it so; and yet how 
effectually is thus revealed what it means to get the power of 
the new life thoroughly incorporate with our blood and breath. 
He it is who identifies the most inner values of life with the 
simplest acts and experiences: reducing it to terms of eating 
bread, and drinking water, and walking in daylight, and bear- 
ing fruit like branches of a vine, and following, like sheep, the 
voice of a Shepherd, and entering into a door and finding pas- 
ture. With all these everyday figures, too, St. John's vocabu- 
lary is throughout large and elemental: the terms light, life, 
love, truth, world-filling conceptions, are the controlling terms 
of his portrayal of things; he uses them with all the easy as- 
surance and consistency with which we use the technical terms 
of a science or a philosophy. ''This then is the message," he 
announces as the starting-point of what he would maintain in 
his First Epistle, ''which we have heard of him, and declare 
unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." 
It is as if he would describe the creation of a new world, with 
its initial decree "Let there be light," like the primal decree of 
old, except that the light and He who commands it are identi- 
fied as one; and as if henceforth all the new creation were 
resolved into the question of walking and growing and bearing 
fruit in the kindly power of the light. "He that loveth his 
brother," the epistle goes on to say, "abideth in the light, and 
there is none occasion of stumbling in him. But he that hateth 
his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and 
knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath 
blinded his eyes." A simple elemental matter this; as ele- 
mental as instinct and the rudimentary life of nature. Then 
again, declaring that "God is love," he makes a practical iden- 
tification too bold and direct for a philosopher to dare, that * 
"he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him." 
It is the one bold, assured, luminous step from premise to con- 
clusion: dwell in love, let that be your central vitality, con- 
trolling all your relations near and distant, filling your world 



296 THE LIFE INDEED 

full, as it is in you to apprehend your world, and the problem 
of your living is solved. That is a matter not of logic and 
deduction, not of philosophy and speculation, not of the mere 
intellect, but of the spirit and the elemental being ; it lays hold 
of our sympathies and antipathies, as these have been tem- 
pered and educated by love and a divinely directed life. The 
tests which he applies to life, and if you will look at his first 
epistle you will find it full of such tests reduced to plainest 
issues, are one and all tests of the spirit. "Beloved," he says, 
"believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are 
of God." Though so frankly intuitive, his mind is not ram- 
bling and blindly adventurous; he it was, you remember, who 
in the earlier days of his unregulated impulse, when he was 
ready to denounce incontinently any who did not see just as 
he did, incurred from Jesus Himself the reproof, "Ye know 
not what spirit ye are of." But the sojourn in the intimate 
presence of the Life Indeed, and the long succeeding years of 
meditation and inner growth, had made his tests luminous and 
sure; like the man born blind, whose recovery he records, he 
could say, "One thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I 
see." This insight, which is just one phase of a larger life- 
filling energy, carries with it also the same absolute, antipa- 
thetic, supremely victorious power of dealing with the 
sinfulness of human nature; it is to him like the spiritual 
prepossession that shuts all of us absolutely out of the lower 
temptations and crimes; sin is as alien to all the pulsations of 
his being as arson or highway robbery is to us; "whosoever is 
born of God," he says, — not opens a new account wherein as 
soon as sin is committed it is forgiven, but — "doth not commit 
sin" at all. "We know," he says again, "that whosoever is 
born of God sinneth not; but he that is begotten of God 
keepeth himself, and that wicked one toucheth him not." In 
a word, he is defining life, in all its powers and crises, accord- 
ing to the new idiom; there is a kind of reversal of our every- 
day view whereby, according to his intuitive insight, he is 
describing things as they look, and as they essentially are, as 
approached from the divine side of the veil. In such spiritual 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 297 

scenery it is, he virtually says, that we, to whom is given power 
to become sons of God, are empowered to move and have our 
being. And the education we get here is of the same absolute 
strain; it is just progressive insight, coexisting with progressive 
purity and strength, as we advance toward the supreme goal 
which, being unseen, is still unknown except in its essential 
power. St. John it is, you remember, who gives what is after 
all the most simple, and yet the most searching test of the 
life to come: ''Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it 
doth not yet appear what we shall be ; but we know that, when 
he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as 
he is." Eyes to see, coordinate with beings to assimilate and 
appropriate the highest manifestation of life; that is the sum 
and crown of it. 

If we were studying St. John's mind psychologically, we 
should say there is a prevailing note of the feminine in it: it 
goes straight to the heart and root of the matter; it needs no 
crutches of logic and groping premise because it instinctively 
feels what is truth, approaches the ultimate meanings of things 
by the tactile sympathy of insight and vision. To such a mind 
the dull processes of proof, and equally the warping and im- 
peding motions of sin and evil, are practically eliminated: the 
divine-human manhood, for us as for Christ, just is^ and that 
is all there is to note; it is, and we are, and here is the iden- 
tity, put here on earth, and moving toward its unseen goal of 
insight and realization. From such intuitive strain of mind 
it is that we most truly derive our best impulses to growth and 
pure progress ; it is the alluring and assuring power of our new 
world. This it is that Goethe has in mind in that famous sum- 
mary of his, at the end of his greatest poem: 

Alles Vergangliche 
1st nur ein Gleichnis; 
Das Unzulangliche, 
Hier wird's Ereignis; 
Das Unbeschreibliche, 
Hier ist's getan; 
Das Ewig-Weibliche 
Zieht uns hinan. 



298 THE LIFE INDEED 

This too is written, like St. John's words, as if things were 
seen from the holy mount, the other side of the veil: Every- 
thing transitory is only a parable; the inadequate, here it be- 
comes actual event; the undescribable, ineffable, here it is 
done; the eternal womanly, which loves and feels and sees at 
first hand, — this influence it is which allures, draws us on- 
ward, to light and life. It is not by logic that we are saved, or 
philosophy, these are but the support that life must devise for 
our dim groping intellect; not by mere fightings with evil ten- 
dency and obedience to law and earning reward or escaping 
punishment; these are but relics of an older and childish dis- 
pensation; it is by walking in the noonday light of life, walk- 
ing forward and upward in the eternally feminine might of 
straight insight, and faith, and love. 

Now it is of crowning interest to note how such an absolute, 
intuitive mind as this of St. John's will confront the universal 
fact of death. To this, after all, this event which to Old Tes- 
tament saints was the king of terrors and which to New Tes- 
tament saints, exultant as they are, is still the last enemy to 
be destroyed, — to this we must come, and adjust our new view 
of things to it. And I think it is mainly to clear up this enigma 
that St. John has added to former accounts his record of the 
raising of Lazarus. Tennyson has blamed him for not com- 
pleting the story and telling what Lazarus saw beyond the 
tomb during that four days' sojourn; it would so reassure us, 
he says, by telling what it is to die. 

Behold a man rais'd up by Christ! 

The rest remaineth unreveal'd; 

He told it not; or something seal'd 
The lips of that Evangelist. 

Why, this is just what the story does tell us; or rather it tells 
us what it really is to rise from death, and this is so much 
greater, so much more truly in the uninterrupted current of 
life, that death actually disappears, is abolished. To rise from 
death is not to be resuscitated, as Lazarus was, with all the 
old organism and powers intact, ready to sit down again at 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 299 

table, and take up again the old relations, and have all the 
process of existing and dying to go through again; if this were 
all there is in resurrection, as Browning has described in his 
poem of Karshish, it would simply leave Lazarus bewildered 
with a double consciousness, trying to adjust the reestablished 
currents of the old world with the prematurely realized glories 
of the new. Nor is resurrection simply waking up at some 
future indefinite time, when the list of candidates is so fully 
made up that all can enter upon the restored life together. 
Martha already had this hope for her dead brother. ''I know," 
she said, "that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the 
last day." And the tremendous answer that Jesus gave, the 
answer that is repeated at all our burial services, corrected this 
crude notion by saying, not that men who lived the new life 
of faith should rise again, but that they should not die at all: 
"I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, 
though he were dead yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth 
and believeth in me shall never die." Here is the supreme 
absolute of John and Jesus; as the crown and culmination of 
the long history we have traced, death is regarded as actually 
and literally abolished. "Said I not unto thee," Jesus answers 
to Martha's last shrinking objection, "that if thou wouldest 
believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?" Here it is; 
but its inner guise is not what Martha deemed ; it had to come 
to such minds as hers, perhaps, by a negative, by a crude mir- 
acle of resuscitation showing first what the grand uprise of life 
is not; and so perhaps it has to prove itself to most of us, 
tangled up as we are in the life of the senses and in the sur- 
face shows of things; but to an intuitive mind like St. John's, 
which devoted a lifetime of meditation to its large meanings, 
this glory of God, this ideal made real, brought to remem- 
brance the central mind of Christ, and death was seen not as 
circumvented or evaded but essentially abolished. O friends: 
have we not been naming the wrong thing death? We have 
given the name not to the thing itself but to the symbol, to 
that physical event which with all things transitory is only a 
parable. And our fears and doubts have clustered about the 



300 THE LIFE INDEED 

symbol ; to this we have closed our eyes in dread, or endeavored 
to meet it in stoicism and bravado, while the thing itself, which 
is our own selfish refusal of the spirit of life, has been to us 
a thing unreal, with which we have played, or which we have 
doubted, as if it were only a non-existent fancy. And when we 
see and deal with the thing itself, vanquishing it by our faith 
and will, as vitalized by the spirit of Christ, we find that im- 
mortality is a present fact, that mortality is swallowed up of 
life. Such is the culmination that the working consciousness 
of St. John, the intuitive mind that sees the end and knows the 
good, has labored, from the youth of his wonderful vision to 
the ripened wisdom and insight of old age, to make plain to us. 



IV. THE MIND OF SAINT PAUL 

The mind of St. John, scholars tell us, is the mind of a 
mystic; an accurate enough designation, though I have not 
used the word hitherto, preferring rather to speak in terms of 
what the word means, the thing itself. Men have an invet- 
erate habit of giving a thing a name, and thereby putting it 
as it were into a pigeon-hole, out of the sight and present grip 
of life, where it is available only as casual occasion rises for 
reference. To call a man a mystic is virtually to remove him 
from our everyday and prosaic world into a region where sup- 
posedly the landscape is just the scenery of the beatific vision, 
with which only exceptional natures can be familiar, and they 
only by transporting themselves through imaginative contem- 
plation into something ecstatic, unworldly, unreal. Thus we 
conveniently take such a man out of our milieu of concrete 
experience and stow him away in his pigeon-hole. But when 
we come to think of it, our real life, the central individuality 
which we can share with no other person, reduces itself not to 
external facts but to inner meanings. No two of us are just 
alike ; no two of us have worlds just alike. There is relatively 
more of the mystic in some of us, relatively less in others; the 
minds of some of us approximate to that of St. John, to a 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 301 

mind that sees splendors and profundities where others see 
only what the retina can picture. We never can tell what life 
is to our neighbor ; his inner seeing self is to us a sealed book, 
which can never be opened until we know as also we are known. 
Life, for every one of us, is what our inmost personality makes 
it. You remember how Stevenson has set forth this truth in 
his immensely suggestive essay, 'The Lantern Bearers"; in 
which, among others, he peers into the mind of a miser, with 
the dreams and ambitions and delights that cluster round his 
crazy clutch for gold. ''And so with others," he says, "who 
do not live by bread alone, but by some cherished and perhaps 
fantastic pleasure; who are meat salesmen to the external eye, 
and possibly to themselves are Shakespeares, Napoleons, or 
Beethovens; who have not one virtue to rub against another 
in the field of acitve life, and yet perhaps, in the life of con- 
templation, sit with the saints. We see them on the street, and 
we can count their buttons; but heaven knows in what they 
pride themselves! heaven knows where they have set their 
treasure!" So it is. The soul of man is a seething alembic 
of vital and creative forces; a living potency of poetry and 
vision and heaven. How many of us, do you suppose, 
may essentially be mystics, eating, drinking, toiling, planning, 
as we all have to do here on earth, and yet all the while 
walking as it were on air, in a sphere beyond the invasion of 
sense? 

We call St. John a mystic; and when we come to square the 
term with what he says and does we find simply that he dwells, 
so to say, at one pole of our common life, the pole where ideals 
have weathered the impeding austerities of struggle and logic 
and become realities. His mysticism does not connote some- 
thing dreamy and ecstatic; rather it is a state of mind crystal 
clear and certain. It gazes on the finished structure of life 
at first hand, as it comes complete from the Master's shaping, 
with the litter and the scaffolding cleared away. To him the 
battle of achieving life is fought and won, the sins and childish 
crudeness of an old era put away in a forgotten limbo to which 
his spirit is henceforth for ever dead. To him it remains now 



302 THE LIFE INDEED 

only to walk in a radiant new light, the light of men, and to 
explore the splendors and vitalizing powers of the light. What 
such an attitude of mind, placed as it is in history, has to im- 
part to us, is surely of untold value. For in this intuitive de- 
termination the mind of St. John is also the mind of Christ, a 
motion as it were straight from the breast on which he leaned 
at supper; the self-same mind indeed which St. Paul says we 
also have, in our scope and degree; though most of us must 
still be Marthas, cumbered with much serving, rather than 
Marys, sitting serene and satisfied at the feet of the Life In- 
deed. With a great sum the most of us must obtain our free- 
dom. St. John was free born. 

When, however, we enter into the mind of St. Paul, we find 
ourselves in a very different region, a region more like the one 
in which the ordinary man must move, and it may be for that 
reason more genial and stimulating. A mind his, not less pene- 
trative of the secrets of being than that of St. John; equally 
capable of immediate vision, though his times of vision were 
not his habitual way of thinking, as of a mystic, but those 
rare occasions when his soul mounted up with wings as eagles 
do. One such he refers to as the turning-point of his whole 
life, that vision on the way to Damascus, when he saw Christ 
face to face, in a glory that left him blinded but filled with a 
grand new purpose. Another such, in which however he would 
not glory, transported him to the third heaven, where he heard 
unspeakable words impossible for a man to utter. It is note- 
worthy that in all these visions and revelations which Scrip- 
ture records, the recipients took the matter just the other way 
round from our way. They never questioned, as we do, the 
objective reality of what they saw and heard; to them the 
scene on the mount of Transfiguration, and the interviews after 
Christ^s resurrection, and the sight of their Lord ascending be- 
yond the cloud, and the vision on the way to Damascus, and 
the mystery of the third heaven, and the apocalypse of him 
who was in the spirit on the Lord's day, were one and all au- 
thentic glimpses of that which most deeply is, though they 
might be uncertain, as St. Paul was, whether they themselves, 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 303 

when they saw such things, were in the body or out of the 
body. To us all such things, whether told in Scripture or al- 
leged in modern experience, are unreal, not to say uncanny; 
subjective we call it, hypnotic, a gleam from our subliminal 
consciousness, not such revelation as can be brought to evi- 
dence in a court of justice. We never doubt that we are in the 
body, and we demand that everything that would claim actu- 
ality and authenticity also be in the body. Rightly enough, 
perhaps; our psychology has changed, though human nature 
remains; and it may be worth while to remind ourselves that 
more rigidly scientific conceptions, and more up to date, are 
not ipso facto more correct, and there are regions of our per- 
sonality and its hidden connections yet to be explored. But 
at any rate — to return from this digression — St. Paul's is 
not a mind to glory in mystic states and visions; and what he 
has to tell us about life and its essential elements is made up, 
like our insights and reasonings, on other grounds. We have 
seen men of unsophisticated mind reporting what they alleged 
was fact and not cunningly devised fable; we have seen in 
St. John one who by masterly intuition identified what he saw 
with the greatest fact that can be revealed to men; and now in 
St. Paul we see one who, equally based on historic fact, applies 
to this the deductive mind, the mind of reason and logical proc- 
esses, and determines its relation with man as he is, and with 
the concepts of a storied and thinking past. 

To enter with any detail into the natural history of the 
mind of St. Paul, admittedly one of the most colossal minds 
of history, would be quite beyond our scope or occasion here; 
we merely wish to see, as we did in the case of St. John, how 
his type of mind places him, so to say, in relation to this great 
problem that we are tracing, the problem of the Life Indeed. 
St. Peter and St. John were Galileans, as was also our Lord; 
they came from a region and atmosphere where the rigid old 
Jewish traditions sat more lightly on men's minds, and where 
there were fewer clogs of prejudice to keep them from leaping 
forward into a new revelation of things. The writer of the 
Epistle to the Hebrews inherited the priestly and sacerdotal 



304 THE LIFE INDEED 

tradition; he thought in its terms; but this, which was in itself 
a symbol, an allegory, a prophecy, was no clog to the new 
view; rather, as soon as its fulfilment came in sight, it gave 
him wings of faith, so that he could without effort enter into 
the holiest by a new and living way. St. Paul's mind, on the 
other hand, was laden, both by heritage and education, with 
an accumulation of traditions, interpretations, legal and na- 
tional presuppositions, which nothing short of a colossal mind 
could resolve, but which, once resolved and concentrated on 
the new life, must needs be of untold significance to the cause ; 
we may almost say the fate of the new cause, as a system and 
sweet reasonableness, lay trembling in his masterly hand. If 
he had reached the point where a vision on the Damascus road 
would set his susceptible soul right, what a stroke of resurrec- 
tion genius — let us say it with reverence — it was on the 
part of the Master to vouchsafe it! St. Paul was brought up 
a Pharisee, according to the strictest sect of the Jewish faith, 
trained in all the lore of scribes and doctors and rabbis, 
moulded in the rigid requirements of law and oracle, no ele- 
ment of the old dispensation lacking. The whole pattern of 
the twilight stratum, from the beginning up to the fulness of 
the time, found in him as it were an instrument, a working- 
tool, shaped to its hand. But he had not become congealed in 
the austerity and pedantry of the old. There was in him a 
tremendous fire and zeal, a soaring poetic constructive nature, 
so that when he became Christian he could have insights and 
speak with tongues beyond them all; a steady conscientious- 
ness, too, which compelled him to act on convictions new or 
old, and made him dare to correct himself and innovate, chang- 
ing from a persecutor to an apostle. All this cast of mind, 
susceptible as it was to growth and change, was no wavering 
or double mind; it was too solidly based for that; rather it 
was grandly consistent with itself, a mind that was strong to 
shoulder aside its huge impediments and make its way to its 
goal of faith and life. 

Two great things St. Paul had to do, in his apostolic mission 
to the world; either of them work for a mind of the highest 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 305 

order: to become free from the law, thus settling the world's 
account with the old system of things; and to open the way 
of life to the Gentiles, thus making the new pulsation of faith 
universal. No one but he had the peculiar spiritual combina- 
tion to compass these. St. Peter, strong rock of the church as 
he was and sturdy in his place, had not mind enough, nor train- 
ing; you remember how, even after his vision of the great 
sheet let down, showing him with regard to the heathen that 
nothing was common or unclean, he could not commit himself 
whole-souled to the new way thus opened, and reverted to a 
Jewish and legal Christianity. St. John, the Sir Galahad of 
the apostolic circle, dwelt in a mystic contemplative region 
of his own; he had, as it were, seen the Grail face to face, and 
was rapt away from men's earthly errors and conflicts, an 
idealist rather than a struggler. 

And now his place desires him in vain, 
However they may crown him otherwhere. 

The Galileans must take to themselves the aid of the Pharisee; 
for there is a great work to be done, a world-work rooted in 
all the evolutionary past; and there must be left no loose 
joints, no crude bungled expedients ; and in the orderly growth 
yet to come all the contributing elements must be accounted 
for. The empire of law, inconclusive as it is for life, is not 
for nothing, and it can pass only by fulfilment. The Jewish 
exclusiveness, necessary though it was for a time, cannot throw 
open its gates to anarchy and licence, for the sake of making 
itself acceptable to the Gentiles ; there must still be an eternal 
separateness and antipathy to whatever is unholy and impure. 
Hence the place we have found for the reconciling constructive 
mind of St. Paul. 

But what we are concerned with here, in pursuance of our 
general subject, is, to note how life and immortality come to 
light, to a mind shaped and trained like St. Paul's; how its 
large elements reveal themselves in order and relation, and 
what attitude of living and belief is thereby engendered. And 
as we look at it, in comparison with that of St. John, the first 



3o6 THE LIFE INDEED 

thing that strikes us is, how much more closely it corresponds 
to the life we all have to live, our ordinary life of hopes and 
fears, of struggle and suffering and aspiration, of gradually 
forming ideals and insights, of actual experience, so rich yet 
often so baffling. St. John does us good by holding before our 
eyes, serene and undisturbed above us, the region of the purer 
air and the eternally won victory. St. Paul does us good by 
showing us the conflict still on, the slow shaping of means to 
ends, the rising into assured strength and faith through the dis- 
cipline of toil and suffering. The light is the same perfect 
light of life; it comes to the self -same evolution and revelation 
in the end; but with St. John walking in the light has become 
as it were an instinctive thing, wherein all our tendencies and 
powers join in sweet harmony and consent; while with St. 
Paul the rebellious elements must be subdued and tamed, and 
the experiences in plain sight before us must be fully reckoned 
with, and the splendors of the unseen must dawn upon us by 
degrees. While St. John, with his powerful intuition, leaps to 
the end and ignores the slow steps of process, St. Paul, with 
his load of tradition and bodily infirmity, and with a mind 
that must deduce things from point to point, is still in the 
thick of the process, clearing away the obstructing clouds and 
fogs. 

For one thing, St. Paul must stay to wrestle with the prob- 
lem of righteousness, that ideal of the law of being; and in 
the same conflict he must have dealings with the law itself, 
which has become to him a thing not Mosaic merely but cos- 
mic and elemental. And as his exacting, conscientious nature 
looks into it, he makes a great discovery: namely, that in the 
nature of the case and of man the law is an impossible thing. 
It cannot be kept. However athletic the man may be to train 
himself in the observance of it, his sinful will or weakness will 
break loose somewhere; he will transgress or come short, and 
offending in one point will manifest the alien spirit and so be 
guilty of all. To cherish the only ideal worthy of a perfect 
law necessitates this, saying nothing of the corruption and in- 
firmity of man. Like Arthur's ideal for his knights, so his 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 307 

ideal righteousness, imperative as it is, has become unattain- 
able: 

For the King 
Will bind thee by such vows, as is a shame 
A man should not be bound by, yet the which 
No man can keep. 

Besides this too, he finds a law of sin in his members, warring 
against the law of his mind, and bringing him into captivity. 
St. Paul was too spiritual, too penetrative to remain a typical 
Pharisee; he never could have stood in the Temple, like that 
Pharisee of the parable, and thanked God that he was not as 
other men are. The innate corruption and limitation that is 
in all men he saw and felt and acknowledged; he put himself 
by the side of the most degraded, in that category where all 
are included under sin, if by any power of insight, looking from 
that common depth, he might discover light and life. And 
one of his two great achievements, as I have noted, is to have 
become free from this impossible law, this body of death. He 
discovers this freedom not by anarchy, not by licence, not by 
any sort of indifference to righteousness, but by the access of 
a higher power of life. ^'The law of the spirit of life in Christ 
Jesus," he says, ^'hath made me free from the law of sin and 
death." This is his grand solution, whereby in every man's 
soul the battle is fought out, and the victory won by a power 
not our own, yet truly our own, for it is the spirit of highest 
manhood. 

No one reaches greater heights of triumphant, exultant life, 
no one brings forth more abundant fruits of the spirit, than 
does St. Paul; yet about it all there is the note of effort, van- 
quishing of untoward elements, vigilant watchfulness and 
overcoming. ^Walk in the spirit," he says, "and ye shall not 
fulfil the lusts of the flesh"; but you see the lusts of the flesh 
are there, in fell working potency; to be subdued not as St. 
John would do and as Jesus did, by the sheer impact of an- 
tipathy, but by the expulsive power of a new affection taking 
up and preempting the field. It is a strategy, a directed battle 
of life. So, as compared with St. John's tranquil ideal, we may 



3o8 THE LIFE INDEED 

say that instead of walking calm and holy as a perfected new 
man St. Paul must first kill the old man. There is a sternness 
and peremptoriness about this idea which comports well with 
St. Paul's fiery turbulent spirit. The figure of death, not only 
of putting our evil propensities to death but of ourselves de- 
terminately dying to what is alien to us, plays quite a part in 
St. Paul's thinking; we are not merely to pity ourselves as 
naturally sinful but candidates for healing and forgiveness; 
we are rather to take heroic measures with our whole inner 
nature, are to reckon ourselves dead to sin but alive to 
righteousness. In this new energy of the spirit we are to enact 
in ourselves, so to say, the great elemental drama of life and 
death, strenuous, determinate; with the triumph of newness 
of life is to be coordinated the grim tragedy of the death of 
the old man. 

Just so it is, too, that St. Paul approaches the life and min- 
istry of Christ. To him, you know, that life was not a subject 
for detailed biography but a rounded solution of things, an 
idea; he was an apostle born, as he says, out of due time, and 
did not know Christ after the flesh. This was to his advan- 
tage, perhaps, in his work of universalizing the gospel; for as 
the world grew older, and customs changed, men could not 
take, as the first disciples did, the naive and childlike way of 
following the steps of an example; they must take rather the 
adult way of living in the same spirit of love and faith. And 
this is how St. Paul apprehends Christ. Of the specific events 
of Christ's life his spirit fastens especially on the death and 
resurrection; these are truths for every man to incorporate 
in his being; but he does not dissociate these two, as St. John 
virtually does; to him resurrection is resurrection from the 
dead. If we had only St. John's ideal to go by, we might al- 
most gather that the uprise of life was designed to be just a 
kind of melting into the next stage of being, the unveiling of 
a glory, like the transfiguration of Christ, without any conno- 
tation of antecedent death at all. But this, however true it 
may be spiritually, remains necessarily a very unreal thing to 
us here in the body, who with all our potencies of spiritual 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 309 

achievement, still have physical death to reckon with. St. 
Paul, however, takes death and resurrection together; one 
must rise out of the other; one derives its worth and stamina 
from the other. There must be effort and strenuousness and 
sacrifice to correspond to the glory and rapture of the uprise. 
It was in this way, rather than after the flesh, that St. Paul 
aspired to know Christ; it was for this kind of knowledge that 
he counted all other things as relatively contemptible. ''That 
I may know him," he says, ''and the power of his resurrection, 
and the fellowship of his sufferings; being made conformable 
unto his death, if by any means I might attain unto the resur- 
rection of the dead." He had a positive appetency for all the 
hard things that lay in the road to such a culmination ; for the 
tribulations which, because, through the wholesome discipline 
of patience, experience, and hope, they led eventually to the 
shedding abroad of the love of God in our hearts, he could 
glory in; even for some glorious opportunity, in his own flesh, 
to fill out the sufferings of Christ. Thus through that same 
spirit of life his fervent endeavor was to create a Christ within 
his own energizing turbulent nature. He has much to say of 
the death of Christ; he has theories, more or less vague and 
rabbinic, of what is called atonement. As we compare his 
words on this matter with each other we cannot say he worked 
his thoughts on it quite clear and luminous; but on one point 
he is positive and strenuous: Christ died, not merely that we 
might live, but that we might die the same kind of death, in 
the same spirit of sacrifice, of love to men, and faith in the 
regenerative power of human nature. If He laid down His 
life that He might take it again, and in so doing take all the 
fulness of manhood with it, so also the spirit of Christ- 
like manhood should impel us to do; it is our business not 
to be mere beneficiaries of Christ but uttermost reproducers 
of Him. 

The same conception of things shows very significantly in 
his attitude toward the majestic ideal of righteousness, the 
righteousness which is of faith, as contrasted with the old 
righteousness, which is of the law. The righteousness which 



3IO TFIE LIFE INDEED 

is of the law reduces to a very simple and obvious thing: the 
man who doeth these things shall live by them; that is plain 
enough, and that is sufficing. But here comes in his tremen- 
dous discovery that the law is an impossibility; the trouble is 
you cannot truly do these things. Express life in terms of 
doing, of work and wage, and you come to a deadlock; your 
power runs out; you have not life enough to fulfil the ideal of 
a law which expands to a thing so impossibly holy and just 
and good. You must have a new access of power, of the spirit 
of life. And now when that spirit takes possession of you and 
puts you into a wholly new attitude to things, the attitude of 
initiative, venture, faith, how shall it work out its problem of 
righteousness? St. Paul has shown us this, in a passage which 
has always been too hard a nut for the commentators to crack. 
Let us look at it a moment. After saying that '^ Christ is the 
end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth," 
he gives that belief a voice, sets it to philosophizing, as it were, 
on the question how it, as such, shall produce righteousness. 
'^The righteousness which is of faith," he says, ''speaketh on 
this wise. Say not in thine heart. Who shall ascend into 
heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down): Or, Who shall de- 
scend into the deep? (that is, to bring up Christ again from 
the dead.) But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even 
in thy mouth, and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, 
which we preach; That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth 
the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath 
raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the 
heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth 
confession is made unto salvation. For the scripture saith, 
Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed." The ob- 
scurity of this passage comes partly from the fact that St. 
Paul is adapting old scripture words to his purpose, perhaps 
with a little touch of rabbinism; but if we keep to his funda- 
mental presupposition and point of view the sense is clear. We 
must remember that faith is speaking, and trying to get into 
terms an ideal of action, of righteousness. Now if we are 
trying to attain to an ideal, two conceivable temptations may 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 311 

rise to invalidate our endeavor: we may either desire to lower 
the ideal, so as to bring it within bounds of feasibility; or we 
may desire to attain the same ideal by a different way. To 
both of these temptations St. Paul interposes his negative. 
There your ideal is, clear and plain; you see the life that Christ 
has achieved, the perfect rightness of manhood, you see the 
way he took to reach it; all lies before you in the good news 
that we are preaching. Now if your faith is true and integral, 
you won't try to lower that ideal of life, by bringing Christ 
down to something less than consummate life, you will take 
the ideal just as it is, however lofty, and commit yourself to 
it; neither will you try some other way to get to it, by bringing 
Christ up from the dead, making the way less strenuous than 
death and resurrection ; you will believe in your heart that this, 
however hard, is the one perfect way of rising to perfect 
righteousness, and all the life which your mouth confesses, the 
action which mirrors itself in your sincere word, will conform 
itself to that way of voluntary death, if by any means you too 
may attain resurrection, and that same Christ will be your 
Lord of life. Such faith will be ashamed neither of the height 
of its ideal nor of the depth of humiliation through which loy- 
alty to it leads. For this spirit of Christ has become a prac- 
tical element of manhood; not only of the emotional rapture 
which the contemplation of its glory engenders, but equally 
of that sturdy righteousness which expresses itself in doing 
and enduring and truth. 

With St. Paul, conscious as he was of the law of sin in his 
members, and moving in a Gentile world of fleshly degradation 
and corruption, the life of the rebellious body and the element 
of physical death cannot be ignored; they must play a car- 
dinal part in his tragical drama of the consummation of life. 
If we had only St. John to think for us, with his idealized word 
"Whosoever liveth and belie veth in me shall never die," we 
could hardly think of any other outcome of existence but that 
of a disembodied spirit, whatever that may be; and even here 
in the flesh St. John conceives of life almost as it were dis- 
embodied, without any members at all to work weakness and 



312 THE LIFE INDEED 

confusion. With St. Paul the members are all here, with their 
tendencies and heredities; and our business is to present them 
as instruments of righteousness unto holiness; our privilege 
and glory to present our bodies a living sacrifice, holy, accept- 
able unto God, which is our reasonable service. It is in just 
this connection, you remember, that he bids us be transfigured, 
metamorphosed, by the renewing of our minds; as if somehow 
the new spirit that is in us were to shape a new body. And 
this, in fact, is just his fundamental conception. When the 
life rises to its height it is not to be a division and dissociation 
of the elements of nature, not the survival and uprise of a piece 
of life, but the whole nature — body, soul, and spirit — enter- 
ing a higher stage of being together, intact and glorified. For 
this he works; to this end he conforms his precepts of conduct; 
these temples of the Holy Spirit, which our bodies are, are to 
be kept so holy that corruption can have no power on them, 
here or hereafter. This idea fills his cosmic ideal too; he has 
a genuine conception of the far end of evolution in his thought, 
of the whole creation groaning and travailing in pain together 
until now, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of 
the body. To this end he conforms that constant figure of 
his, of our being members of Christ, working His will and 
agencies of His spirit, while He, the Head, sends forth the 
intelligence and the impulse that always animates us. It is a 
noble, a world-filling conception; with the practical value of 
conforming to men and things as they are. Here is the spirit 
already with us and in us; the power of resurrection already 
circulating through our members, shaping an organism within, 
which he calls a spiritual body, and thus getting ready for a 
final uprise which in the end is not death at all, but birth. 
The spirit is already ours by a new birth in Christ; but it re- 
mains yet for the body, through the nourishing and transfigur- 
ing power of the spirit, acting through the acts and sufferings, 
the ennobled energies of our earthly life, to be born. It is as 
if physically we were still in the embryo stage of existence, 
still in the womb of a shaping active world, drawing form and 
development and beauty from its meats and drinks and work 



THE ACCOMPLISHED FACT 313 

and plans; and as if, when the hour which we call death 
strikes, our resurrection were by the birth of a full-orbed or- 
ganism of life to demonstrate its majesty and power. So when 
at last the body is laid aside it is, as it were, but the casting 
away of a placenta, an afterbirth, whose function is done, it- 
self henceforth a worthless insignificant thing. This, I believe, 
is virtually St. Paul's conception; and it conforms exactly, you 
see, to the long developed evolutionary conception which we 
have been tracing. 

So when St. Paul approaches the end of life he comes after 
all, by his own more strenuous way, to just the same outcome 
that St. John held so serenely before him; for him too, as 
truly as with St. John and Jesus, death is actually and literally 
abolished. He expresses this under the figure of striking a 
tent and moving on to a new and higher stage of our journey. 
'We know," he says, ''that if our earthly house of this taber- 
nacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not 
made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, 
earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which 
is from heaven: if so that being clothed we shall not be found 
naked. For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being bur- 
dened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, 
that mortality might be swallowed up of life." So it is: he can 
be content with no piecemeal survival, no disembodied naked 
essence going on to an uncouth and unimaginable beyond, leav- 
ing its values of sense and bodily existence behind; it takes 
its new body with it, the body which, though sown in dishonor 
and corruption, is raised in strength and beauty. What this 
spiritual body is, this organism for the behests and activities 
of the higher life, we cannot well understand until we can study 
its anatomy and physiology from the other side of the tapestry 
of life; but we cannot call it an illogical or irrational idea; it 
conforms, in fact, more closely to our evolutionary demand 
than any other. Evolution must henceforth be spiritual, but 
it need not throw away all the discoveries it has made of or- 
ganism and function and the orderly support of the conscious- 
ness and the will. 



314 THE LIFE INDEED 

So with the shaping mind of St. Paul, though physical death 
remains a fact, with all its accompaniments, yet because its 
sting is removed, and life has so swallowed it up as to have 
transformed it into a glorious birth, it is abolished, and life 
and immortality stand forth in fulness of noonday light. 



VII 

INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 

"What is it when suspected in that Power 
Who undertook to make and made the world, 
Devised and did effect man, body and soul, 
Ordained salvation for them both, and yet, 
Well, is the thing we see, salvation?" 

I, The Ux\T:rLED Mystery 
II. Though Our Outward Man Perish 
III. Why STA^^) Ye Gazing up into Heaven? 



VII 
INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 

NEVERTHELESS I tell you the truth," said Jesus in 
his farewell discourse; "it is expedient for you that 
I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will 
not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you. 
And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of 
righteousness, and of judgment: Of sin, because they believe 
not on me; Of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and 
ye see me no more; Of judgment, because the prince of this 
world is judged." These words, plain and simple, as adapted 
to the simple-minded group who first heard them, map out on 
broad lines all the inner history, all the history that can be 
called vital, which is yet to be; for they are in the enlarging 
order of things, revealing the connecting link between Christ 
and humanity, and thus opening the culminating stage of the 
majestic chapter of manhood evolution. What was expedient 
for them is just as expedient for us. The disciples thought, as 
tradition had told them, that when the Messiah came He would 
abide forever; and to their conception that was the summit 
of well-being, to have always with them the bodily presence 
of Him who could be implicitly followed as King and Leader 
and Judge. Even these solemn words of Jesus did not strike 
in, at first; this old idea held the field and crowded them out; 
one of the first questions they asked Him when they saw Him 
in resurrection form, safe back from the dead, was, ''Lord, 
wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom of Israel?" 
But you see it takes time to get a new ideal into vital power; 
and their minds were not enlarged enough to see how rudi- 
mental, how childish it is after all, to have all our thoughts 
and beliefs and judgments made for us, and doled out to us, 
as it were, from a central bureau, leaving us in general unable 

317 



3i8 THE LIFE INDEED 

to take a step forward until we receive marching orders. Even 
now, after nineteen centuries, we see how slow the world is to 
replace the monarchic idea by the democratic; how slow and 
timid we all are to bear our weight on the law of the spirit of 
life, as feeling within us the wisdom and authority to do so. 
And yet this, just this, is what our Lord's words contemplate. 
It is expedient for us that the Incarnate Word go away; that 
He be no more an object of sense, to be seen and heard and 
followed about from place to place; because henceforth the 
guidance of life must be incorporated with our nature, breath- 
ing with our breath, thinking with our thoughts, loving and 
hating with our love and hate, shaping the fair fabric of life 
with our hands. Our Lord's departure was in the way to this. 
He left us, but as He said He would not leave us orphans; left 
us that a better thing than His bodily presence might come to 
us. And if we, like the disciples, doubt what could be better 
than His bodily presence, a moment's reflection guides us to 
the essential truth that the new thing that was to come was 
the self-same thing that was taking its leave; only it was to 
come closer, not stopping at our bewildered eyes but coming 
all the way to the centre of our being; not coming to sojourn 
as in a tabernacle, but to take up its permanent abode, as in 
a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. The 
same risen Personage who said, ''It is expedient for you that 
I go away," said also, ''I will not leave you orphans; I will 
come to you." "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end 
of the world." 

An evolution, in the nature of the case, must have a tele- 
ology; that is, by the very order and adaptation that are evi- 
dent in every part it reveals some masterful design, orbing 
into larger fulfilment from the beginning, and steering toward 
a vaster and determinate end which, whether it comes fully 
in sight or not, prophesies its significance and nature by the 
working potencies it brings progressively to light. Natural 
selection, development of species, survival of the fittest, and 
all the other processes named in the jargon of science may be 
verifiable facts; they are all on trial, undergoing the severe 



INVENTORT OF VITAL VALUES 319 

testing of observation and definition; but they are only proc- 
esses after all; and when all is done there remains the main 
problem, the tremendous end toward which these are but 
means. Evolution cannot rest, any more than could Ecclesi- 
astes, in the thought that all this turmoil of forces and develop- 
ments merely goes round in a circle, gyrating through the 
generations and returning on itself. It has a teleology; how- 
ever it moves round and round it moves also upward, revealing 
at every stage a surplusage to apply on the next stage and make 
the sum of things better, nobler, maturer. This is the huge 
fact that our review of things has brought to light in the grad- 
ual uprise of manhood as evolved by the power of the free 
spirit of life. We have seen how out of the species has risen 
the full-orbed individual, fitted in the obedience of perfect 
law, yet in the supreme venture of perfect freedom, to act on 
other individuals, to show every one the way of life, the ful- 
filment of his complete personality. But now, at the date of 
Christ's resurrection, it has only been shown, for men to look 
at and analyze; and as a spectacle it is to be withdrawn. To 
what end, after all, was all this pageant of life, this abysmal 
venture of faith, this colossal experiment of being? Success- 
ful indeed, as resurrection shows; but to what end, unless this 
resurrection be also the firstfruits of a vaster resurrection? 
You remember how Browning, speaking as if he were Renan, 
has portrayed how a sensitive mankind feels in the idea that 
Christ came but to shine a little space and disappear again, a 
description beautiful in its utter sadness: 

Gone now ! All gone across the dark so far, 

Sharpening fast, shuddering ever, shutting still, 
Dwindling into the distance, dies that star 

Which came, stood, opened once ! We gazed our fill 
With upturned faces on as real a Face 

That, stooping from grave music and mild fire, 
Took in our homage, made a visible place 

Through many a depth of glory, gyre on gyre, 
For the dim human tribute. Was this true? 

Could man indeed avail, mere praise of his. 
To help by rapture God's own rapture too, 

Thrill with a heart's red tinge that pure pale bliss? 



320 THE LIFE INDEED 

Why did it end? Who failed to beat the breast, 

And shriek, and throw the arms protesting wide, 
When a first shadow showed the star addressed 

Itself to motion, and on either side 
The rims contracted as the rays retired; 

The music, like a fountain's sickening pulse. 
Subsided on itself; awhile transpired 

Some vestige of a Face no pangs convulse. 
No prayers retard; then even this was gone. 

Lost in the night at last. We, lone and left 
Silent through centuries, ever and anon 

Venture to probe again the vault bereft 
Of all now save the lesser lights, a mist 

Of multitudinous points, yet suns, men say — 
And this leaps ruby, this lurks amethyst. 

But where may hide what came and loved our clay? 
How shall the sage detect on yon expanse 

The star which chose to stoop and stay for us? 

All this, you see, sadly beautiful as it is, is in direct traverse 
of the words of Christ we have quoted. "I will not leave you 
orphans; it is expedient for you that I go away." And as to 
why it is expedient for us, we can do no better perhaps than 
to add Browning's supplementing stanza, spoken in his own 
proper person, after he has described how Christ, though ab- 
sent in bodily presence, has become identified with the spirit 
of our world: 

That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows. 

Or decomposes but to recompose, 

Become my universe that feels and knows! 

This, when we compare it with our evolutionary outlook, rep- 
resents not merely the poetry and phantasy of the matter; it is 
the sober outcome of the Bible interpretation of life. 

The business of our present chapter is to make an inventory 
of the main vital values that inhere in this culmination of man- 
hood evolution, translating them, if we can fairly do so, from 
the scripture idiom into the idiom of to-day. 

I. THE UNVEILED MYSTERY 

The first vital value that we note is that Christ, now be- 
come a diffusive and universal spirit, is identified with the con- 



INVENTORT OF VITAL VALUES 321 

scious spirit of manhood everywhere; His unique life the rec- 
ognized Hfe of man, His spirit the revealed spirit of man. The 
historical Christ goes away that the essential Christ may take 
His place and become by that means the controlling element 
of character and a new vital power in the world. The writer 
to the Colossians — I am not sure whether it was St. Paul, but 
at any rate he writes in the vein of St. Paul's later years — 
described this as ''the mystery which hath been hid from ages 
and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints; 
. . . which is Christ in you, the hope of glory." The two 
epistles to the Colossians and the Ephesians say a good deal 
about this mystery; out of twenty-six or twenty-seven occur- 
rences of the word in the New Testament ten are in these two 
short letters. A mystery, in the apostle's view, is something 
which has always existed, being as essential to humanity as 
anything however clear, but it has only now come to light, 
only now have the elements been supplied for the comprehen- 
sion of it. And this mystery is the mystery of Christ in us. 
In whom? The writer speaks as the apostle to the Gentiles; 
and repeatedly he speaks with wonder of the fact that the 
Gentiles — the word, you know, is the same that is used to 
designate the heathen — show just as authentic marks of its 
presence as do the Jews; the possession of it breaks down the 
walls between the nations and the ages, and puts all men in 
one great united family. In other words, this mystery of 
Christ in us, now unveiled, is something that belongs to man 
as man, and to the man of all time past and to come. Not 
it, but just the unveiling of it, is the distinction of the Chris- 
tian dispensation; it was really there in man always; Christ 
was there, away back in the ages, a dim pulsation of manhood, 
and men did not know it. And if Christ in us is the hope of 
glory now, so He was then; Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, 
and to-day, and for ever. This is only another way, you see, 
of describing the coming of life and immortality to light; our 
large question, as I said earlier, is not when all this began to 
be a fact, but when and how it was revealed so that men might 
know what was all the while in them, and might act intelli- 



322 THE LIFE INDEED 

gently upon it. It has come out into the light, so that we can 
give it a name, and note its vital elements, and commit our 
spirits to it; but it was always there, ever since the spirit 
moved on the face of the waters, and in its growing illumina- 
tive power we have been led hither. Why, the soul of proph- 
ecy was Christ in men; you recall how St. Peter dwells on that 
picture of the prophets searching with wonder what the spirit 
of Christ which was in them did signify, and trying to find a 
time where suffering and sacrifice would fit in, as they looked 
toward that which was to be. The very sustenance and re- 
freshment of the wilderness journey, according to St. Paul's 
allegorical account, was Christ; ^'they drank of that spiritual 
Rock which followed them: and that Rock was Christ." This 
diffused universality of the spirit of Christ is a great discovery 
to make; even though the mystery has been unveiled so long 
we are ourselves slow to acknowledge it; and how many there 
are to-day who, like these disciples who wanted to call down 
fire from heaven, know not even yet what manner of spirit 
they are of. 

If this mystery is so permanent and wide-spread there must 
be many ways in which Christ may be in manhood; or rather 
perhaps one way, when we get down to it, but under multi- 
tudinous conditions and combinations. It would be hazardous 
for any of us to say where He is not, or to measure out just 
how much or how little there is of Him in our neighbor's soul; 
for there are last that shall be first. About as safe a way for 
us as any, perhaps, is to fall back on the aged St. Paul's judg- 
ment, as he saw his time so filled with heresies, ^'Nevertheless 
the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal. The 
Lord knoweth them that are his." Of this we must say more 
later; but here for a few moments we must note the historical 
movement by which this mystery of Christ in man was gradu- 
ally unveiled. 

All along it has been the scripture way to spell the secrets 
of life out in concrete facts, which men may see and handle; 
and when the meaning and power of the fact strikes in, so as 
to be a source of motive and wisdom in man, then the crutch 



INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 323 

of outward sense is removed. This applies to the whole life 
and ministry of Christ, the Life Indeed. And when resurrec- 
tion had set the supreme seal on His life, there is to be noted 
the very remarkable way in which this support of sense was 
removed gradually, as common men could bear it, and in its 
place gradually substituted the inner light and power of the 
spirit. All this was done in such condescension of love, vv^as 
so in the tender character of Christ, that it carries its truth 
on the face of it; no mind short of Christ's could have in- 
vented it. ^'Such ever was love's way; to rise it stoops." The 
body that came from our Lord's tomb, you remember, had 
something very strange about it. It seemed of this earth, yet 
not of this earth; seemed to be endowed with mysterious re- 
versed powers. As some one has described it, ''what was 
natural to him before seems now miraculous; what was before 
miraculous is now natural." Though He had lain there only 
three days, yet His nearest disciples did not recognize Him 
at first; and in each case of recognition they had to have a 
preparation of mind, of awakening spirit, in order to identify 
Him at all. The journey of the two disciples to Emmaus is 
typical in this regard; wherein He walked with them several 
miles as a stranger, making their hearts burn within them as 
He opened the Scriptures to them, before they knew Him by 
the familiar act of breaking bread. He stands suddenly in the 
midst of a company; He vanishes as suddenly. There are 
various minds to be convinced, various degrees of faith to be 
supported; and so He submits to the tests fitted to each, shows 
the wounds and lets them touch Him; though to the first one 
who saw Him He warned "Touch me not." Even the incident 
of the empty tomb, seeming to prove that the material body 
had been transformed into a body immaterial, was in the line 
of necessary identification; it was for their and the world's 
sake, however, inexplicable; and at any rate it demonstrated 
the absolute ascendency of spirit over matter. But all this, 
we may fairly say, this reestablished materialization, belonged 
to the uniqueness of the event; it was an individual phe- 
nomenon, like all His miracles, whereby love wrought its pur- 



324 THE LIFE INDEED 

pose of showing resurrection to be real ; not, however, intended 
to reveal a species phenomenon. The resurrection of the body 
is not the same as the resurrection of matter; we must learn 
to separate the two in our minds. There is a spiritual body, 
St. Paul says; but flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom 
of God. It was this mystery, both sides of it, that our Lord's 
strange forty days after resurrection would demonstrate; He 
would show them that the spiritual body is both a body, not 
a naked essence, and spiritual, not material; and to show it 
He began, so to say, at the material pole, and working step 
by step, as they could comprehend it, toward the spiritual pole, 
at the end had so accustomed them to the tremendous new 
truth, that when He was finally parted from them, never to 
submit to such testing any more, they returned to Jerusalem 
v/ith great joy. There is a gradation observable here too. To 
have recognized Him once, by a crude test, was no guarantee 
that they would recognize Him at the next appearing. The 
succeeding test was apparently less material, finer, requiring 
an advance in spiritual perception; so that, though on that 
first appearance in Jerusalem they were affrighted and needed 
reproach for their hardness of heart in doubting His identity, 
on the later appearance at the sea of Tiberias, where all was 
like a restored companionship and joy, ''none of the disciples 
durst ask him. Who art thou? knowing that it was the Lord." 
It looks like a divinely adapted advance toward the point 
where the crutch of sense and material apprehension could be 
removed, and their Master could be to them a Reality appre- 
hended purely by the spirit. Those forty days were the stages 
of a transition. 

Nor was this the end. The next step of manifestation, 
though now spiritual, began even yet at a kind of physical 
pole, according to what they could apprehend, though in the 
physical phenomenon least suggestive of matter. A v/eek after 
His ascension, you remember, when the day of Pentecost was 
fully come, the Spirit filled the house with the sound as of a 
rushing mighty wind, and became visible in tongues of flame. 
Perhaps this too was a concession to the simple conceptions of 



INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 325 

the time; the Jewish mind craved a sign; and perhaps such 
a sign was necessary to authenticate the strange new enthu- 
siasm and power that endued them all at once. They must 
know and identify the source of their new access of life; so 
that with full assurance they could say to believers and gain- 
sayers, ^'This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are 
witnesses. Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted, 
and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy 
Ghost, he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear." 
But this too, with its train of marvelous spiritual gifts, was 
only a step in the process whereby the mystery of Christ in 
man, the hope of glory, was revealed. The mystic splendor 
faded into the light of common day; but let us guard our 
thoughts against deeming the spiritual endowment, by being 
diffused through all our prosaic duties and deeds, became less 
real; it became even more real, more essentially available, by 
becoming more purely spiritual, and depending not at all on 
the support of sense. ''Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, 
neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which 
God hath prepared for them that love him. God hath revealed 
them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, 
yea, the deep things of God." These words of St. Paul do not 
refer, at least primarily, to heaven ; they refer to the light that 
is shed abroad by the felt and obeyed presence of Christ in us. 
We will remember that the Jew interpreted his life accord- 
ing to what we are pleased to call an antiquated psychology. 
In all his times of health and disease, and in all unusual ex- 
periences, he was open to the influence or subject to the inva- 
sion of spirits. A man who was insane was in his idea 
possessed by a demon; an alien personality had usurped his 
will and consciousness; you remember how many times Jesus 
conformed his cures to this psychological idea, and how the 
demons themselves, if there were such, obeyed His behest ac- 
cording to the same psychology. So also to the Jew the world 
unseen was practically the world of the air; and this was 
peopled with spiritual beings with whom in various ways our 
life had relations: there were angels, with their orders and 



326 THE LIFE INDEED 

hierarchies, who were employed as ministering spirits sent 
forth to aid those who should be heirs of salvation; there was 
an evil power of the air, with its prince, a spirit working in 
the children of disobedience; there were principalities and 
powers, spiritual wickedness in high places, against which as 
by hand to hand fight it was the Christian's business to wrestle. 
All the inner operations and relations of life were thus, as the 
philosophers say, objectified; not merely personified, like po- 
etic figures, but conceived in terms of actual living personality, 
of unseen impulses and wills capable of impact on us, as we 
act on one another. There was a quasi physical and material 
quality in their idea, too, quite foreign to our ways of thinking: 
the spirit of God was the breath of God; the spirit of evil was 
as it were a crazing and miasmatic atmosphere working havoc 
in men's lives. When Jesus met His disciples after the resur- 
rection, and gave them their commission for the time to come, 
He breathed on them and said, "Receive ye the Holy Spirit." 
We have just noted, too, the phenomena that accompanied the 
coming of the Spirit at Pentecost, the sound as of a rushing 
mighty wind and the tongues of flame. The effects were 
correspondingly marked and visible. Mockers attributed these 
to new wine; and Peter took pains to tell them that it was 
too early in the day for these strangely exhilarated men to be 
drunk; nay, later in the history of the intensified new life 
that had come to men, St. Paul is careful to separate its means 
and origin from analogous physical inducing means; ''Be not 
drunk with wine," he says, ''wherein is excess, but be ye filled 
with the Spirit." Even in modern revival efforts men speak 
in the same psychological idiom; they pray for spiritual out- 
pouring, as if somehow there were a vital fluid out in space, or 
in the region just above our heads, which in a way transcend- 
ing our initiative, may come in to flood us with exhilaration 
and enhanced joy and energy. It is as good a conception as 
any, the best perhaps, for the common unmetaphysical mind 
to approach the source of its highest life; infinitely better, 
surely, than to suffer a modern psychological abstraction to 
fade it away into nothing at all. There is a holy power not 



INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 327 

ourselves to be accounted for and reckoned with; it must not 
only be ours, but be translated into our ways of thinking; but 
it must not be denied and evaporated in the process. 

I have already spoken, in an earlier chapter, of that won- 
derful providential guidance by which, all through the twilight 
period of growth, the Jewish mind, surrounded though it was 
by nations given over to necromancy and demon worship and 
all the uncanny inquiry of the occult, would never submit it- 
self passively to the invasion of spirits through mediumship 
and vulgar psychic hypnotization. To study the reason of 
this in detail would be well worth while, but of course we can- 
not go into it here. I think one reason was because the Jewish 
spirit and genius could never consent to be a passive thing, 
helplessly acted upon from without; it cooperated vigorously 
and intelligently with its unseen influences ; it insisted that the 
spirits of the prophets be subject to the prophets; and the 
Holy Spirit that it would call to its aid was conceived as a 
spirit bearing witness with our spirits, thus meeting us on 
common intelligent ground. Besides, there was its growing 
clarifying idea of God, the great Reality, which idea must at 
every step be identified with authentic realities, revealing a 
glory, a splendor, which however transcendent must be recog- 
nized as true to our highest ideals. This produced a spiritual 
disdain for those dim uncertain underworld phenomena, what- 
ever they were, that invaded the colorless passive mind of the 
medium; the grand heritage of his religion and his practical 
wisdom, beginning with the reverent fear of God, had made 
these things antipathetic to him. So when the time came for 
the long hidden mystery to be unveiled, the mystery of Christ 
in us the hope of glory, his mind in spite of its now antiquated 
psychology, or perhaps indeed by reason of it, was already 
well educated, both negatively and positively, to apprehend 
it and act upon it as it essentially is. And on it our more scien- 
tific conceptions may safely build; there is nothing in it to 
make succeeding ideas of life and spirit other than true and 
wholesome. 

When therefore we try to realize the truth of Christ in us, 



328 THE LIFE INDEED 

our honest way to deal with it is to translate it into our own 
psychological terms, thus completing the transition that was 
begun at Ascension and Pentecost. If it has become alien to 
our sense of reality to think of that human Person who was 
born at Bethlehem and died at Calvary as now somehow dis- 
tributed through the world, as a diffusive power or pulsation, 
like electricity or light or magnetism, it is at least open to us 
to think what there is in men who pay homage to Christ to- 
day, what spirit there is now potent which, because it unites 
us in a common joy and a common hope, traces back its origin 
and illumination to Him. There are not wanting abundant 
analogies to help us. We can think of the wave of reform and 
new faith that swept over the hearts of men when Luther made 
his brave stand against the paralyzing errors of his time; we 
can think how Napoleon's personality had in it a power to in- 
spire and characterize an army and a period of history; we 
can think how a mighty spirit of patriotism and hatred of 
slavery was diffused through the North in our Civil War, mak- 
ing the people for a time one will, and bringing an enlargement 
of life and being which still exists in power. All these in- 
stances show what potencies slumber in manhood, waiting only 
the illuminative word and the fitting time to call them forth 
into energy; and what a perpetual hope of better things the 
successively awakening potencies are. Such facts are the 
commonplaces of history. Can we not think back from these 
to the origin and concentrated potency of them all; to the light 
which shone when Hope itself was born? We nucleate them in 
the name Christ; in Him these various potencies, the prophecy 
of progress to better things, become concrete, elements of a 
large world personality, a spirit which we can name and define. 
The sum total of this spirit we call the Holy Spirit; which, in 
one true sense at least, is, as was said earlier in our studies, 
the spirit of wholeness, soundness, the whole man now brought 
to light in a typical Personality, and demonstrating His whole- 
ness by the finished work He did. This wholeness of manhood 
within us, redeemed from the sin and error and bondage of 
man's twilight stratum of being, set free at last to work his 



INVENTORT OF VITAL VALUES 329 

regenerate will on himself and the world, is our hope of glory. 
It existed there, in a dim mystery and onward spiritual surge, 
from the beginning; the potentiality of wholeness, health, 
eventual maturity was an unrest and a prophecy through all 
those dim years; and now that its true centre and principle is 
revealed, it has become a great rest and peace in us, yet also 
an energizing spur to larger, purer things, forbidding us to 
call any earthly thing our rest, or cramp our souls to it, and 
a perpetual prophecy of things that have not yet entered into 
the heart of man. This is Christ in us; this our modern no- 
tions of mind and spirit can appropriate. If we can no longer 
take it as breath and flame and an outpoured fluid, we can 
commit ourselves in strong abandon of faith to the wholeness 
of manhood, and to the supreme principle which sums up and 
unifies its maturity; can resolve to live the life of goodwill 
and good works and sacrifice which, in one divine Person, has 
so demonstrated its fulness and power. This is Christ in us; 
this is the same yesterday and to-day and for ever; this makes 
the ideal of our being, however high our evolution puts it, not 
an unattainable despair but a lively hope. 

It is our inveterate tendency to confuse our hope and the 
hope of our neighbor by applying some other standard than 
this to our destiny; and especially the older standard of legal 
morality and sinlessness which Jesus and the apostles have 
so labored to make us outgrow. A strong vein of the Jew is 
in all of us, perhaps indeed ought to be until that current of 
duty is worked clear. We tremblingly ask, Am I good enough 
to be saved? knowing all the while that we are not, and indeed 
that salvation by the Pharisee way, the works of the law, is 
impossible. Then we turn to our neighbor, perhaps in disgust 
and bitter disdain, and say, Can that degraded, unlovely, de- 
praved, heathenish man enter heaven? and sometimes, in our 
American way of joking we say that if he is going there, on 
the strength of salvation wrought for him by faith and the 
church, we prefer to go where we can have more congenial 
company. But most of us still shiver over the question in 
sadness and doubt. "Lord, are there few that be saved?" the 



330 THE LIFE INDEED 

disciples once asked Jesus, when they still had only their old 
law of works and prescription to measure by. His answer, 
accommodated to their idiom, was, "Strive to enter in at the 
strait gate, for many shall seek to enter in and shall not be 
able." The old law of destiny is inexorable: it opens inevit- 
ably that sombre picture of two roads, the broad one, populous 
and crowded, leading to destruction, and the narrow one, with 
only here and there a traveler, leading to life. And our Lord's 
word virtually is. If that is your accepted standard of life, 
strive to obey the strictest, straitest, most strenuous condition 
that you can see imposed on you; you will be none too sound 
and safe then; don't fear that you will do too much, or live 
too ideal a life. But at the same time He says that many of 
whose salvation they have not dreamed shall come from the 
north and the south and the east and the west and sit with 
the spirits of the just made perfect in the kingdom of heaven. 
And then, going on in His ministry. He made the strangest, 
most revolutionary recognitions of the powers of life: ate and 
drank with publicans and sinners; while He pronounced woe 
on the h)^ocritical Pharisees, pronounced the word of salva- 
tion on Zaccheus the publican; and even on the abandoned 
woman who had fallen a victim to her trust in human love 
and fidelity. He pronounced the word of hope: "Her sins, 
which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much." Here is 
the new standard of living, the standard of love, which, though 
capable of the lowest depths of abuse, is also capable of the 
highest things, being, when followed by the committal of faith 
and wisdom, by the truest that is in us, the pulsation of the 
love that broods over all the world, in fatherhood, and sonship, 
and the communion of the spirit. It is this pulsation of love 
that He would call out from its dimness and slumber, and free 
from selfish, degrading elements, and naturalize in the universal 
heart of man. The apostles took up the same endeavor, and 
stated it in its principle: "By grace are ye saved, through faith, 
and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God; not of works, 
lest any man should boast." We read this one-sidedly, as if 
it were our business, as candidates for salvation, to be merely 



INVENTORT OF VITAL VALUES 331 

receivers and beneficiaries of the free gift, and as if, having 
received it, we were only to gloat over what we have secured. 
But grace within us, the free giving impulse of love, is still 
grace; it is not transformed into its opposite; our faith in it, 
our venture of life upon it, makes us henceforth instrumen- 
talities of it, the vehicles of that same overflow of life to the 
world. And this is to have Christ in us; this it was that He 
wrought out consistently, though identified with the poor and 
the publicans and the harlots and the malefactors, going down 
to the degraded depths of humanity, in order to show how 
from the lowest the way of vitalizing, redeeming love is open 
to all. It was a veritable release of the soul of man from his 
prison-house of law and prescription, which without love to 
illuminate it, must remain an ever-increasing bondage. But 
now we have a new standard whereby to judge our neighbor. 
We must allow for the fact that it is the boast of grace to enter 
and take up its abode in the unlikeliest places. A heart almost 
all degraded may still respond, for the sake of wife or family 
or comrade or a world in peril, to the unselfish prompting of 
love; may even lay down life, when the stress comes, for the 
sake of a good which, so far as his body is concerned, may be 
his sacrifice. We cannot tell. The Lord knoweth them that 
are His. That degraded man may at some point have laid 
hold, in a blind faith, on the love of God, and made it operative 
in love of neighbor. Well, then Christ is in him, the essential 
Christ, the diffused spirit of life; and no knowing how slender 
a pulsation, seemingly, may have in it the seminal power to 
grow, and redeem his heritage or education of sin, and 
make his essential being new, and so be, in the long run, his 
full salvation. For this reason it is hazardous to judge men 
on mere moral lines ; we must rather know the amount of love 
and faith that is in them than the amount of works. "Not 
of works, lest any man should boast." Equally inconclusive 
is it to erect a standard of vital judgment which excludes from 
any chance of life those, like depraved criminals, whose wills 
are diseased, or, like idiots, whose mind is undeveloped, or, 
like infants, who have not come to understanding. All these 



332 THE LIFE INDEED 

are hard problems to a moral and legalized standard of judg- 
ment; we cannot force the great world-current of life through 
such narrow channels. Nor can I stay to speak of those 
whose vision of life is not yet universalized and clarified: of 
those myopic souls whose impulse of love cannot get beyond 
their family or parish; of those color-blind souls who in their 
devotion to a philanthropy or a dogmatic system can be harsh 
or intolerant toward those whose love works in narrower or 
strange bounds. There is doubtless something in all of us 
which some time or other will need to be straightened or en- 
larged or corrected. It is a long process to get, as Scripture 
phrases it, Christ formed within us; I am not sure that this 
earthly existence of ours is going to suffice, even for us who 
have all the experience of the past to learn by. We cannot tell ; 
but meanwhile let us take comfort that the mysterious power 
of growth and sacrifice has been working in man from the 
beginning; that the Lamb was slain from the foundation of 
the world; and that both we and our neighbor have eternity 
to grow in. We have also in us that wonderful power of rec- 
ognizing according to the love that is in us, rather than accord- 
ing to the theorized merit that is in others; on this our 
judgment hangs. If we do not cultivate this, the Helper when 
He comes may convict us of sin, because we believe not on 
Christ. It resolves itself in this, after all, the mystery of 
Christ in us is the bearing of our whole weight on the perfect 
loving manhood that through so marvelous a history of the 
spirit is revealed as the one way of manhood life. 

II. THOUGH OUR OUTWARD MAN PERISH 

The cry that for several decades has dominated the religious 
sentiment of our age and land is. We don't want theories, we 
want facts. It is a wholesome plea; it lays hold of the ele- 
ments of hope, reality, promise. But like all popular senti- 
ments, it is as shallow as it is deep; that is, it may be shallow 
or deep, according to the spirit in which it is held. The nega- 
tive side of the plea, we don't want theory, or as men have 



INVENTORT OF VITAL VALUES 333 

been pleased to dub it, we don't want dogma, is, and for 
decades has been, a very shallow thing, and not without bad 
effects, as must be the case with everything superficial. It 
has done much to empty our churches, to discredit the noble 
profession of the Christian ministry, and in general to pitch 
the life of the rank and file in a low key. Perhaps indeed the 
ministry itself, the country through, has not remained wholly 
untouched by it; perhaps the ambassadors of Christ have 
sometimes let their high credentials go under partial eclipse, 
while in their endeavor to make their message popular and 
workable they have played too much to the galleries. After 
all, ministers have a good deal of human nature in them; they 
are not so far beyond us but that we of the rank and file can 
still keep them in sight and judge them; besides, it is not our 
business to sit in judgment on them, or anybody, but rather 
to draw our own views of life from the same Word that is sup- 
posedly in them. This shallow plea, then, comes back just as 
straight to us as it does to them; the Word is nigh us, in our 
mouth and in our heart; and if we have not the teaching office 
in our hands, we have in our keeping the general level of faith, 
and are alone responsible for its being high or low. Now this 
cry, we don't want theory, pitches our faith low; it opens the 
door to all those lazy, easy-going, drifting people who hate 
to think and want to get into some instinctive sort of life that 
shall merely run itself. So it brings about, if we are not heed- 
ful, an unspoken ideal of Christian living as if it were not an 
arena where we must fight for what we get, or run a strenuous 
race for a prize, but rather a nice soft bed where we can lie 
and rest, with the comfortable feeling that we have a ticket 
for heaven under our pillow. I suspect, however, that the 
real meaning of this shallow plea is not that we don't want 
theory, but that we don't want the theory that we have in- 
herited from Augustine and Calvin and Jonathan Edwards; 
and the trouble is that too many have let it go at that, without 
troubling themselves to inquire what they do want. For the 
fact is, we cannot very well believe without believing some- 
thing; so if we too lightly abjure theory, which is only an- 



334 "I' HE LIFE INDEED 

other name for theology or dogma, the alternative is apt to 
turn out no faith, no really grounded character, at all; and 
in the end the plea of less theology and more religion issues 
inevitably in less religion, in a sort of vanishing quantity. It 
is but another example of what I have so many times spoken 
of: the evil effect of taking up with the negative side of an 
ideal, and letting the positive side go. I don't believe in nega- 
tives: they are good for nothing under the sun but just pur- 
poses of definition, they only show where the real thing, the 
positive truth, begins, and our concern is to leave them behind 
and thenceforth ignore them. 

It is false and shallow, then, to say we don't want theory. 
We do want theory; we want all we can get, we must have it, 
if we are going to live our lives in any sort of order and prin- 
ciple. If we have faith in God, we must have a theory of God, 
a theology; if we commit ourselves to faith in man, we must 
have a theory of human nature, an anthropology. Our theory 
may not be articulated into all the minutiae of a philosophical 
system, but it must be real and have a basal principle; it must 
be what we call a working theory. The Greek word from 
which our word theory is derived is very simple ; it means two 
things, the act of looking at a thing, and the thing looked at. 
According to its connection it may mean either of these; and 
we need both of them: we must be energetic enough to look and 
look hard, and we must have something to look at so definite 
and real to us that we can venture life and destiny upon it. 
That is theory; and no individual of us, however he may feel 
lost in the crowd, can absolve himself from this obligation, so 
long as he has an active and intelligent life to live. 

But v/hile we must have theories, and while they must be as 
searching as our best thinking can make them, we certainly do 
want facts too; this part of the plea is strong and wholesome. 
It is the facts, the actual application in experience and prac- 
tice, that test our theory. This is only another way of saying 
that in order to be good for anything our theory must prove 
itself true by doing what it promises to do. And if one theory 
does not work, or has ceased to do all the work we need of 



INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 335 

it, we do not mend matters by throwing up the game; we must 
try another. ^'By their fruits," was our Lord's word, ^'ye shall 
know them"; and if our enlarged, emancipate, adult life craves 
fruits which the old theory of living is ill-adapted or inade- 
quate to bear, then we must reconstruct life on a new basis. 
But a basis we must surely have; and it must be a higher, 
roomier, more vital basis than the old; for there are greater 
fruits to grow and gather, and there is a greater manhood field 
to grow them in. Men are awakening to this truth to-day; 
they are getting sick of negatives and of their poverty of doc- 
trine. And if the old Puritanism, which practically made 
Jews of them, will not serve, they must have something better; 
and the thoughtful among them will not, in their desire for the 
better thing, think scorn of the old, or throw it heedlessly 
away in their lazy indisposition to think. It was not so that 
the early disciples did. They were placed in a precisely analo- 
gous position to ours of to-day. They felt, they knew by 
spiritual insight, that the old regime, the heritage of many 
centuries, was decrepit and ready to vanish away. But they 
were not unprepared for the crisis: they already had a new 
theory of life which not only more than took the place of the 
old, but retained all that the old had proved sound and en- 
during. And now they were subjecting the new to the test of 
fact and experience. Will it work? was their question; like 
the life of Christ when it was first lived, so now, their life, on 
the same divine lines, was a colossal experimentation, a kind 
of laboratory work of test and verification. 

Let us think of those early disciples, then, as first those 
simple-minded, straight-minded men, like Peter and John and 
James the Lord's brother, whom the Bible calls "pure in heart," 
whose minds are not so warped by prejudice and the accumu- 
lations of conventional tradition but that they can commit 
themselves in common-sense clearness to the new vision of life 
that their Master has made real and concrete; then secondly, 
as added to these, men like Paul and Apollos, who have the 
culture which enables them to cope with the world's ideas, yet 
who retain through it all the same singleness and consistent 



336 THE LIFE INDEED 

purity of heart, enabling them to translate their new idiom 
of life into a workable theory; then thirdly, we must not leave 
out, as the most significant element of the whole, the rank and 
file of the lay disciples and members, a joyful and loving body, 
who if they cannot think deeply can at least lay down their 
lives, and cheerfully bear all that comes surging up against 
them from whatever quarter, to show what a new vital prin- 
ciple can accomplish in practical living. These, after all, were 
the test and proof of the Christ spirit; they were the witness 
bearers, the martyrs, whose blood was the seed of the church. 
We have not their thought in written words, nor any record 
of their mental acumen, but their lives were sown in the brown 
earth, like their Master's, falling into the ground and dying, 
that a great harvest might in time spring up therefrom and 
bear much fruit. It is impossible to estimate the immense 
vital value that came to the world from the freely sacrificed 
lives of these nameless believers in the power of the new life. 
Have we thought of it? A story I once heard may help us 
realize it. Two men, devout clergymen of the Church of Eng- 
land, were once earnestly debating together about the first 
generations of Christians. The Church of England, you know, 
sets great store by the Fathers; thinks, reasonably enough, 
that as men lived nearer to Christ's time and were privileged 
to walk in the more immediate rays of His presence, their 
doctrine must have been purer, their lives saintlier, their view 
of divine things straighter and more trustworthy. But one 
thing greatly disturbed these two devout men : the fact that no 
illustrious name, no winged word, no brilliant achievement of 
these primitive Christians has come across the centuries to 
us. Not a single notable thing that they did is on record. 
Men more entirely common place and mediocre than the im- 
mediate followers and successors of the apostles it would be 
hard to find; and the century in which they lived is perhaps 
the most uninteresting in Christian annals. So despite their 
assumption of what must have been, these two pious men soon 
found their inquiry reduced to the simple question, What were 
those early Christians good for? Having discussed this ques- 



INFENTORT OF VITAL VALUES 337 

tion till late at night without reaching any satisfactory con- 
clusion, the friends prayed together and separated, one of them 
setting out for his home in another part of the city. As he 
was well on his way, however, still revolving the problem, sud- 
denly the answer flashed upon him like an inspiration; and 
hastening back to his friend's room he called out in triumph, 
''I have it! They were good to burn! '^ I think you will agree 
with me that the answer was as true as it was striking. It 
reveals to us the most tremendous vital value in the world: 
men in whom is working one redeemed and quickened spirit, 
the unveiled mystery of Christ in manhood; and these were 
without any fuss or parade just living the life and dying the 
death of their Lord, yielding all they have and are to the great 
Idea that has come to vitalize them. And if it had not been 
for these, what fruits of Christianity would the world be 
noting and gathering to-day? Follow out those nameless 
martyrdoms, as the leaven of them spread from heart to heart 
and from age to age, and mind and imagination are lost in the 
greatness of it. 

The vital value that we noted in the last section seemed to re- 
duce all the new life to terms of spirit; and though in a way 
we are becoming aware that the power of spirit is the only real 
power we can trace in life, yet as soon as we name the word 
spirit, our idea of things is apt to dissipate itself into some- 
thing vague, shadowy, unreal; if it is a vibration, like mag- 
netism or electricity, it is a vibration whose wave-lengths and 
wave-contours we cannot devise instruments to measure. It ob- 
stinately refuses to express itself in terms of mechanism; and 
so we too lightly conclude that there is really nothing in it. 
That is the quarrel that our materialistic and biological science 
has with spirit, and you see it is simply the quarrel that it has 
with life itself: it cannot compute the curve of an idea, a mo- 
tion, an emancipated will, that is big enough to fill life full, 
permeating and transforming all its character and material 
energies, without giving any account of itself except its own 
reality. 'The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest 
the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and 



338 THE LIFE INDEED 

whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the spirit." 
It is a wholly baffling thing until we consent to measure it in 
its own terms; but then it is at once the simplest and the 
deepest thing in the world. 

One thing, however, we must not leave out, and it is the 
vital value that forms the specific subject of our present study. 
A bad result of our prevailing vagueness of conception is that 
we are apt to postpone the working of the resurrection spirit, 
relegating it to some unseen realm away off somewhere, and 
to some indefinite future, while we leave the poor body, which 
for the purpose we have separated from its soul, sickening and 
decaying and dying here. We have given scant rights to our 
body; it is a thing that, because we go at it in the wrong way, 
we really understand as little as we do our spirit. So according 
to men^s disposition, worldly or otherworldly, they either 
make it the prey of lusts and luxuries, with their grievous en- 
tail of disease and premature mortality; or else, treating it 
as an enemy, try to kill its appetencies by some sort of asceti- 
cism, under which term we may include not only such self- 
tormenting as we ascribe to anchorites but the modern vagaries 
of dieting and dosing. Or, if we adopt the more wholesome 
idea of mens sana in corpore sano, the sound mind in a sound 
body, which is as good Christian doctrine as it is heathen, we 
are so apt, in our ardor of training and exercise, to lay out all 
our spiritual energies on the body that by the time we get to 
the question of putting in the sound mind there is hardly 
enough mind left to be worth perpetuating; it is all so absorbed 
in golfing and football that the serious question rises whether 
for such a soul eternal existence would not be an unendurable 
bore. Have we reckoned with the problem of ennui; do we 
realize how vital may, for many, become the question whether 
after all life is worth living? I sometimes wonder about those 
hapless mortals whose mind is to them so little of a kingdom 
that they have much ado, by various inane distractions, to 
kill time; I wonder, if time hangs so heavy on their hands, how 
they are going to kill eternity. Nor is it the play side of life 
alone that suffers; the work side too, however interesting or 



INFENTORT OF VITAL VALUES 339 

successful the work is, shares the same unbearableness and 
exhaustion; the worn-out body and nerves have some day to 
cease from it, just as the athlete inevitably breaks down; and 
the corrective no more comes by stopping work than the cor- 
rective of the other side of life comes by stopping play. It 
goes back, after all, to the inner source whence work and play 
proceed, to the intrinsic spiritual man, as he really is whether 
in action or at rest, to man with that endowment of life which 
answers to his supreme aspiration. ''Not that which goeth in 
at the mouth," said our Lord, ''defileth a man, but that which 
Cometh out of the heart"; we may say the same thing too of 
that which upbuilds and makes life worth living. We may 
get a partial object-lesson toward this truth in the way men 
absorb themselves in art and learning; and in the saving fact 
that every man is capable of doing things ideally, and going 
on doing them in spite of penury and sacrifice ; and in the fact 
that the highest work a man can do, the work that calls out 
his best ideals and energies, is work that he would scorn to 
be paid for except in kind. The very work we do, the very 
free play of talent and genius that we love, is perpetually call- 
ing us away from our bodies, what we shall eat and drink and 
wherewithal we shall be clothed. But you see our errors come 
from assuming that the body is on top; and along with this, 
from the idea that we must die anyhow, that we must be sub- 
ject to the shoal of diseases and decrepitudes that are them- 
selves merely stages of dying, and that we may as well accept 
the situation and have the evil event over. In other words, 
so far as the body is concerned, we still, in spite of our Chris- 
tian revelation, make up life with reference to death; it is 
bodily death we are looking for and dreading, however we may 
try to stave it off by asceticism and dosing, or meet it with a 
show of bravado. Our theory of life is concerned; we need 
a more livable theory, one that is adapted to work higher 
things than the things of the body and the world. 

Right here we may learn some very suggestive things about 
vital values from the lives of those nameless common men who 
were only good to burn. They could not do the acute think- 



340 THE LIFE INDEED 

ing; could not cipher out rules of living by logic; but they 
were imbued with one great simple idea that would work; they 
had learned to make up life not with reference to death but 
with reference to life, life ever more and fuller. For them 
death was in the most essential sense actually and literally 
abolished. Now when you come to think of it, this was a 
tremendous working idea; and we can think how tremendous 
must have been the ground swell of the spirit which could 
raise the living faith of common men to such a high level. 
They had to get at it, unsophisticated minds as they were, by 
the simplest and concretest ways, and the idea had to grow 
from elemental beginnings. From the first, too, it had to es- 
tablish itself in the face of this universal lot of death to which 
all mankind is subject. To live as if this last enemy were prac- 
tically killed, and therefore a negligible quantity, — how shall 
the man of the rank and file learn this? It was a spiritual 
truth, a truth of the unseen, and yet it must be laid hold of in 
terms of the body; the whole man, not merely the ethereal 
part of him, must have the benefit of it. Well, there was the 
initial fact, for constant faith and reference, that their Lord 
when He rose from the dead left an empty grave and showed 
them a body that they could see and handle; a miracle if you 
please, a unique thing whose reality our sapient scholars are 
doubting, but certainly a miracle placed where it could do 
most good, and what is of most consequence, having power as 
an idea; a whole increasing community of men forthwith began 
to live as if it were so. That is the main point. Then there 
were other plain ideas accompanying this: this same risen 
Master was all the while just over that unseen boundary, ready 
to receive His own; and further, He was coming again, very 
soon, before they died perhaps, and the end of this world and 
the beginning of a new unworldly kingdom was hard at hand. 
Do you say this was a false scaffolding for their thoughts? 
But it was adapted to their minds, it was on their level, per- 
haps their lowly conceptions had equal shares in the shaping 
of it; and above all, it was a working idea that led straight to 
the noblest, joyfulest living. They had to live in perpetual 



INVENTORT OF VITAL VALUES 34T 

liability to death by violence and torture; but they leaped ex- 
ultingly to meet it, for that was the death that Christ died, and 
with that death was especially associated the power of His 
resurrection. Then meanwhile they had their spiritual gifts, 
among which were gifts of healing; and they lived long in the 
confidence that they were to be immune from deadly poisons 
and serpents, and that the prayer of faith would save the sick. 
Their body was to be healed and cared for, by the power of 
the spirit that was in them. Then gradually changes came 
upon this idea ; and we cannot say whether these came because 
faith lessened or because it deepened and broadened, becoming 
a more spiritual, less purely material thing. The era of aston- 
ishing feats of the spirit passed just as soon as its vital value 
was secured; but it passed into something greater and more 
universally workable. ''Covet earnestly the best gifts," St. 
Paul told them; "and yet show I unto you a more excellent 
way"; and this, you remember, was his occasion of assuring 
them that while the exceptional feats of the spirit were bound 
to pass, yet faith and hope and love survived, and that love 
was the greatest thing in the world. The same apostle gloried 
in tribulation also, because that was the austere friend which 
steered them through growing stages of inner discipline until 
the love of God was shed abroad in their hearts. He found 
indeed among the Corinthians that faith was not up to the 
mark, that many were weak among them and many sick; 
that was a thing that ought not to be; their spirits, endowed 
with such gifts, should have better control over the body than 
that. But later he seemed to have learned, and with him 
the church, that we could not expect to go on ignoring or evad- 
ing disease as if we were immune; that sickness and decay, 
like tribulations and hardships, were necessary facts of life, 
to be dealt with as things to be undergone rather than evaded. 
If, as he believed, this physical body was as it were a womb 
in which a spiritual body was getting ready to be born, and 
if it was our duty to be transfigured by the renewing of our 
minds, yet this was not to come about necessarily by a pro- 
gressive release from bodily ills, but in spite and presence of 



34^ THE LIFE INDEED 

them; besides there was a fighting faith and beauty of love in 
the way he met bodily suffering which was itself a triumph of 
the spirit. And so the spiritual body, by whatever experience, 
might go on forming itself and essentially transfiguring the 
man; or as he expressed it, ''though our outward man perish, 
yet is our inward man renewed day by day." In this truth 
it looks as if the naive faith and expectation of the early Chris- 
tians were at last translated into their ultimate spiritual value. 
The inward man had come to his own; was asserting a power 
of life which day by day rose superior to the physical un- 
towardness and progressive decrepitude that were the natural 
accompaniments of the day. 'Tor this cause we faint not," 
he said. There had been cause for fainting and doubt, as the 
exultant first disciples saw little by little that in spite of their 
marvelous spiritual gifts the tendency to sickness and evil-hap 
still remained; and while they were growing old, and some of 
them dying off, still their Lord did not come for them. Their 
faith was losing the support of its initial physical wonders. 
So it was: the scaffolding of the exceptional and astonishing 
had to be gently removed, as men could bear it, and from the 
light of miracle men must emerge into the light of common 
day. But when the inner man is strong and comely enough 
to stand alone, facing with joy and courage all the adverse 
winds that blow, it is better that he stand without scaffolding. 
This is only a little broader interpretation of the saying, "It 
is expedient for you that I go away"; the Christ of the mar- 
velous and immediate response must go away, that the Christ 
of the individual himself, with his individual initiative, may 
have his chance. If, though in its insidious forms death at- 
tacks his mortal frame, just as it used to do, if all the while 
his inward man rebounds with daily renewal, then in a still 
truer and more practical sense Christ is formed within him, 
the hope of glory. It is just in this connection, you remember, 
that St. Paul figures our bodily frame as merely a temporary 
tent, in which we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon 
with our house which is from heaven; and as soon as that 
tent is struck, as if it had been a kind of veil, there emerges 



INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 343 

the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. You 
remember too how the language of dying, the conception of it 
as extinction or even as a crisis in life, wholly disappears from 
the New Testament vocabulary; instead of it, the apostles 
speak of falling asleep, of putting off this tabernacle (St. 
Peter's word), of departing and being with Christ, but not at 
all of death as an enemy, or having any real existence, not at 
all as Job and the psalmists and prophets spoke. Yet the 
thing that both apostles and prophets faced remained as ever, 
and its attendant train of bodily ills and decay was still here 
as ever. We learn a great deal in Scripture from the concep- 
tions that disappear, extinguished by larger light and vitality. 
That the conception of death as death, and of disease as a 
thing that unmans us, should have died out of men's habitual 
thoughts, is, when we think of it, the strongest possible cor- 
roboration of the coming of life and immortality to light. 

So that progressive spiritualization of the early Christian's 
thoughts was like a perpetual voyage of discovery, in which, 
while in the course of time they were fated always to encounter 
new views of truth, new waves of disclosure, yet always the 
fundamental thing that they had discovered, the mystery of 
Christ in man, remained intact, and made itself good with 
every new application; it proved itself an ever deepening and 
broadening vital value, adapted alike to body and spirit. It 
was from the first bestowal of the Spirit, with its quasi ma- 
terial effects, a means of their living spontaneous, joyful, as 
it were instinctive life, in which they were delivered from 
the drag of reckoning with disease and death, and could have 
the full energy of faith to lay out on other and more real pur- 
poses. But also it was a means of culture, and of advancing 
wisdom; it stimulated thought, it invited men to explore and 
verify their theory of life and apply it to things as they are. 
From that day to this it has been the world's deepest educa- 
tion; and yet in the process it has lost no whit of its initial 
power, even while it has gathered power in its advance into 
the unseen. Now since those wonderful early gifts faded from 
their material manifestations into the light of common day. 



344 "THE LIFE INDEED 

the culture side has been more in evidence; so that while men 
have followed its growth into their systems of theology and 
ecclesiasticism they have tended more and more to ignore its 
working in their bodies and nerves, and to give this latter 
phase of life, the bodily, into the keeping of mechanical and 
materialistic theory, into the exclusive hands of surgery and 
medicine and diet. In this they have not been wrong; and in 
this they have accomplished marvelous things; witness, for 
example, how the one element of cleanliness and sanitation has 
wrought to uplift and ennoble the life of man. But there has 
also been an over tendency, by this very one-sidedness, to 
separate our nature into two discordant parts, body and spirit, 
and to keep the phenomena of the two apart, as it were in 
water-tight compartments which have no communication with 
each other. You know, too, how unable the majority of men 
are, with all their culture, to think of two things at once; in- 
stead of combining the two, like notes in a musical chord, 
into a third harmonious compound, they deny one in order to 
emphasize the other, and so go on as one-sided as before. So 
men have suffered the side with which the Christ work began 
to go under spiritual eclipse; they have surrendered it too 
much to the exclusive operations of material nature; they 
have forgotten that the Christ in them, just the same as the 
Christ in history, who began His work with healing diseases, 
that this same Christ in them intends health, that His spirit, 
just as truly as was the case at Pentecost and in the initial 
nascent power of spiritual gifts, intends healing and health. 
The truth is, this law of the spirit of life works, and ought to 
work, to effect not only a universal spiritualization but a uni- 
versal incarnation; its saving power is as great in the body as 
in the mind; the whole man is quickened and raised from the 
dead together, the inner wars and discordances removed; this 
is the great truth that resurrection, as distinguished from sur- 
vival and ultimate separation of soul from body, is designed 
to establish as the crowning destiny of life. Now here in our 
modern days we have a most significant witness of the surging 
of this forgotten truth to the front. I refer to the rise and 



INFENTORT OF VITAL VALUES 345 

prevalence of Christian Science. What there is good in Chris- 
tian Science, — and we cannot deny much good in it, — I re- 
gard as the practical recrudescence, the indignant remonstrance 
as it were, of an inner power of life which had gone too much 
into eclipse. Men had so let their Christian energy dissipate 
itself into a kind of disembodied spirituality, which they heed- 
lessly divorced from common bodily life, that when the prac- 
tical break-up of old theological theories came, and they were 
unable to bank on the real efficacy of their Puritan concepts 
of life and death, they were left with too slender a sense of 
theories that would work; the question became a vital one, 
What does our Christianity, the Christianity congealed in 
dogmas and church observances, really do for us after all? 
Just here, to fill the void for the rank and file who do not 
think, came Christian Science, with its plea that the great con- 
trolling power of the universe is not matter at all but mind, 
and what was more significant still, its impulse of faith, if 
this was so, to apply mind, spirit, confident and active will, to 
the maladies and diseases of the body. And men found, to 
their exceeding delight, that in a large degree this impulse 
of faith worked; they found that the power of the spirit was 
just as real as in the wonderful and early days. Here, so far 
forth, was a theory of life that worked; it produced facts in- 
stead of philosophy, it was a vital power in the incarnate life 
of humanity. All this, you see, was simply a return to the 
elemental first principles of things; it is a recrudescence of 
St. James's truth given to the first generation of Chris- 
tians, that the prayer of faith will save the sick. And 
it was just in the direction that medical science is 
longing for; the doctors no less than the saints de- 
sire before all things to establish among their patients the truth 
that the great beneficent power of nature prefers health, in- 
tends health not disease, and that untold advantage is gained, 
and incalculable potencies of success, just so far as they can 
get their patients to cooperate heart and soul in this truth. We 
can think too, in the case of diseases wherein the imagination 
is on top, all that prevailing class of neurotic ailments wherein 



346 THE LIFE INDEED 

the spirit of modern man has got so tangled up with its own 
miseries, which are no less real for being imagined, — you 
can think what a tremendous advantage it is to give men 
something outside themselves to think of, something that will 
make them forget and ignore their pretty woes, in the power 
of a new impulse toward life and health, even though their 
philosophy of life and health be vague and crude. Nay, the 
field broadens out very large. Why not, in this intense, nerv- 
ous, restlessly enterprising age, apply the same principle to 
business, which in its way seems nowadays to have become a 
kind of disease? In this realm, too, does not the Christ in us 
intend health, joy, the free play of love and faith, confidence 
in an order of things in which we can have our supreme alle- 
giance to a spirit of life, rather than to increasing the abun- 
dance of things a man possesses? Does our regenerate nature 
intend so much sudden break-down and heart-failure as we 
see among those whose worldly cares have so taken up all their 
thoughts that they have really forgotten to live? Do not they 
too need above all to live more in the consciousness of a power 
of life which is mind, spirit, and whose pulsation of love and 
faith heals the sordid selfishness and crooked ways which, 
while they are so exclusively set on worldly success, also work 
like a fever to wear out our vitality? Yes, we may learn some- 
thing from Christian Science as a social symptom and a re- 
crudescence of primitive vitalities; we have too heedlessly let 
some of our Christian heritage lapse into atrophy and become 
inoperative, though the power of it has been ours from the 
beginning. We have not less reason than Christian Science 
but more, to live the joyful, confident, care-free lives that we 
see in so many of the new sect; lives in which the buoyant 
and exultant spirit shall exert its good effect of faith on nerves 
and bodily well-being, while also our very interest in life be- 
comes a thing not wearing but energizing and restful. There 
is no need of making a new sect to discover this; we have all 
the data and motive we need, if we will use what is revealed to 
us. But we have meanwhile waited for Christian Science to 
point out one way, the old way of using the faith it is in us 



INVENTORT OF VITAL VALUES 347 

to have, by which we may recover from our torpid one-sided- 
ness and be made whole. That way is ours no less than theirs. 
If the Christ in us intends life and health, if He is identified 
with the recuperative powers of nature, let us not fear to make 
up life with reference to fuller and freer life, not to death; 
with reference to abounding health, both of the spirit, which 
is the controlling element, and of the body, which ought to 
be the controlled, and which in the divine intention is designed 
to be the clean, sacred, beauteous temple of the spirit of 
Christ. 

But in so doing we cannot afford, in the arrogant name of 
Christian Science — science forsooth! — to outrage science 
itself; and to throw away all the research and experimentation, 
the single-minded devotion to healing and bodily well-being, 
which through the ages has so dominated that high-minded 
profession of medicine, which has so nobly trodden in the steps 
of the Great Physician. When, in order to emphasize the 
truth that God is spirit, Mrs. Eddy proceeds to maintain that 
body is unreal, that there is no such thing as disease, and no 
remedies but remedies of mind, we must in the name of 
common sense take leave of her. When we say No to medicine 
and surgery, and to the means which they with such searching 
wisdom have devised, we are saying No to the plain testimony 
of our God-given senses; nay, we are saying No to our mind, 
to our trained intellect, to our Christian culture, and trying to 
think ourselves into a world just as unreal and one-sided as 
the one we are asked to leave. We are asked to outrage our 
sense of fact in order to maintain a crude thinker's sense of 
theory. In the way '' Science and Health" gets at its interpre- 
tation of things one is reminded of Charles Dudley Warner's 
famous distinction between the two things out of which Chris- 
tian Science has grown, the fads of mind-cure and faith-heal- 
ing: "In the case of mind-cure, you see, one need not have any 
faith; and in the case of faith-healing one need not have any 
mind." Very little if any mind, it would seem, is needed to 
make such a theory of life as Christian Science has committed 
itself to. The strange phenomenon of such a crazy phi- 



348 THE LIFE INDEED 

losophy, in our advanced age, cuts two ways. In the first place, 
it seems to be just an instance of what I have mentioned: it 
betrays a mind so limited that it cannot think of two things 
at once, and so combine them, a mind so dazzled with one 
idea that it cannot see the other, and so has no recourse but 
to deny the existence of the other. It is just as one-sided to 
say there is no matter as to say that everything is matter. In 
fact, the lame point of Christian Science, as is the case with 
every philosophy, is in its denial, its negative; it is so taken 
with the Berkeleian idea that all reality is in our minds that 
it has no eyes for the reality that is in matter. You remember 
how sturdy old Dr. Johnson met the Berkeleian idealism, his 
theory of the non-existence of matter, when it was first 
broached. ''I observed," says Boswell, ''that though we are 
satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. 
I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, 
striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till 
he rebounded from it, 'I refute it thusf '^ This was not phi- 
losophy, perhaps; but neither is the toothache; but it con- 
vinces a common mind of something very real. But in the 
second place, the fact that this crazy philosophy can in this 
late day actually make a sect of itself does not leave the gen- 
eral level of our doctrine unscathed; like the other and better 
side, this side also is a symptom. When we see what theories 
of life whole congregations of otherwise cultivated people can 
take up with, just on the strength of a recrudescent faith, we 
wonder what conviction of truth, what body of doctrine, they 
really had in possession. It looks as if on the theological side 
their minds were found empty and swept and garnished, and 
the new Christian Science philosophy, entering in, had not 
corrective even of common sense to encounter. Is it not an 
indication of the poverty of Christian thought and conviction 
into which too generally men had fallen? 

But we have not so learned Christ. The Christian way does 
not deny fact; it seeks fact, and seeks its sanest interpretation. 
Nor does it make up its theory of life on the basis of evading 
pain, or of seeking an ideal existence where ills are eliminated. 



INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 349 

Rather, it still retains the sense of something to fight, some- 
thing to hold as real and as an enemy, something to overcome 
by the power of life that is in us. "Though our outward man 
perish" — there is still an outward man, subject still to the 
ills of the flesh — ''yet our inward man is renewed day by 
day." So our Christian life still remains an arena for the 
seasoning and renewal of the inner man; and to this end there 
is room for all our culture, our wisdom, our science; we need 
not throw away the fruits of our mental powers for the sake 
of a return to primitive and elemental things; for all things 
are ours, and we are Christ's, and Christ is God's. 

If then, in our inventory of vital values, we have noted first 
that the Christ in us is a progressive spiritualization, we may 
with equal confidence note secondly, that life in Him is a pro- 
gressive incarnation, a progressive adoption into the family 
of those who are realizing in life what the whole creation has 
groaned for, to wit, the redemption of the body. And to this 
end our intellect has share with the rest; its faith is not merely 
instinctive and elemental, requiring the authentication of 
bodily well-being, though this also is its right, but takes into 
itself all the growing wisdom of the ages. Our theory keeps 
pace in sanity with our facts. St. Paul's prayer for men was, 
''That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, 
may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the 
knowledge of him: The eyes of your understanding being en- 
lightened; that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, 
and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints. 
And what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward 
who believe, according to the working of his mighty power, 
Which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the 
dead." Here is an appeal not only to our buoyant appetency 
for health but to our sound and grounded progress in ideas; 
body and spirit are raised into fuller, wealthier life together. 



350 THE LIFE INDEED 



III. WHY STAND YE GAZING UP INTO HEAVEN? 

"Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?" 
These words, which seem to contain a note of reproach, were 
spoken, as St. Luke says, by two men in white apparel, who 
were suddenly perceived to be standing on the spot whence a 
moment before Christ had ascended. They seem to warn us 
not to direct our gaze away off somewhere, straining our eyes 
at an empty heaven and something gone, but to turn and find 
the solution of things here, just where we stand. What shall 
we find, as we betake ourselves from this mount of ascension 
to common life again? Are these words for us the prelude to 
a supreme disillusion and culmination of deception, or to a 
supreme truth, now demonstrated in the flesh, and the cul- 
mination of reality? A momentous alternative this, which we 
cannot refuse to face. This Christ, as we have come to know 
Him better, has satisfied our hearts as a world epitome, gather- 
ing into one Personality all the hidden values of life. If now 
He is gone, all is gone; where are we without Him? Our al- 
ternative becomes poignant and piercing: was all this struggle 
of the manhood spirit co-witnessing with the divine, stumbling 
through the dimness of the twilight stratum, winning painfully 
to the fulness of the time, walking for a bewildered season in 
the mild presence of the supreme historic venture, getting eyes 
hitherto holden true-sighted enough to see the law of the spirit 
of life, — was all this, which we associate inalienably with the 
Christ, — was this ministry which was the solution of it all, 
as men like Renan think, for nothing, a beautiful unsubstan- 
tial episode which passed and left no trace; or rather did it 
reveal the supreme meaning and power and beauty of life, in 
the glory of rounded personality, vanishing only as stars vanish 
before the sun, vanishing yet also here, standing unseen in the 
Presence wherein, though unaware, we have ever been, the 
presence of Him who only hath immortality, dwelling in the 
light which no man can approach unto? Such is the tremen- 
dous alternative pressed upon us by the ascension, which ac- 



INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 351 

cording as we receive it entails upon us a paralysis of sorrow 
or a permanent vitality of joy. You remember how Browning 
has described the sorrow of it: 

Who failed to beat the breast, 
And shriek, and throw the arms protesting wide, 
When a first shadow showed the star addressed 
Itself to motion; 

and what consequence he draws, that, "we, lone and left silent 
through centuries," are thrown back into uncertainty again, 
our life still dim and unsolved. 

We shall not look up, know ourselves are seen, 
Speak, and be sure that we again are heard, 
Acting or suffering, have the disk's serene 
Reflect our life, absorb an earthly flame. 

Not so did it affect those who saw it with their eyes, men 
whose souls, yet unsicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, 
could move in lines of straight and simple consequence. 
'They," St. Luke says, "worshipped him, and returned to Jeru- 
salem with great joy; and were continually in the temple, 
praising and blessing God." If there was engendered a sense 
of loneness, a silence of bereavement, through the centuries, 
surely these Galileans who had the final sight of Him were 
not the originators of it. 

No: rather from that last mystic event on the Mount of 
Olives their simple minds were firmly set toward the positive, 
the glorious member of the alternative; and thenceforward 
through time their faith was an education, continually en- 
larged and enriched, in the meaning and involvement of it. 
This education began, like all their disclosures of life, at the 
point where they stood, at the thing they had eyes to see. The 
announcement with which the two white-robed men followed 
up their monitory question was, "This same Jesus, which is 
taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner 
as ye have seen him go into heaven." This is the most literal 
and visualized prediction that we have of the second coming 
of Christ; and so, whatever else it says, it puts into plainest 



352 THE LIFE INDEED 

and most apprehensible terms the truth that there is a con- 
servation of the spiritual energy and fulness that has once 
come to earth, that it is here not to be exhibited and with- 
drawn but to stay and work an eternal work, not a memory 
only, but a prophecy and a living power. ''Shall so come in 
like manner as ye have seen him go," is the prediction. For 
forty days the Galileans had been under a wonderful and 
unique schooling, being prepared to see Him go. There were 
Peter temperaments among them, and John temperaments, 
and Thomas temperaments; there were soon to be added to 
them the fiery penetrative temperaments of Paul and Apollos, 
and the long line of those who must receive the prediction not 
from actual sight but from report and reading and sense of the 
inner truth of things. How did all these see Him go? How 
have we seen Him go? How then for us shall He come again; 
how shall the conservation and correlation of spiritual energy 
as embodied in Christ manifest its continued existence? Each 
one saw according to his own eyesight and insight; not more. 
But not one of those who remained faithful remained the man 
he was. In a week more a mighty pulsation of light and growth 
was to enter into them; so soon was the essential coming again 
to begin; and they who had looked upon the Son of man were 
in the new transfiguring light to look upon new creations of 
faith and the events of a redeemed manhood going on from 
more to more. They could not remain the men they were; 
they must not. It befell them, as they went on living, as it 
did in Tennyson's vision, wherein he senses himself sailing 
down a mighty river toward the ocean, conducted by maidens 
who as they sailed sang of what is wise and good and graceful, 
and of a bettering world, and so accompanied him toward the 
great deep, where his friend Hallam was. 

And still as vaster grew the shore 
And roU'd the floods in grander space, 
The maidens gather'd strength and grace 

And presence, lordlier than before; 

And I myself, who sat apart 
And watch'd them, wax'd in every limb; 



INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 353 



I felt the thews of Anakim, 
The pulses of a Titan's heart; 

As one would sing the death of war, 
And one would chant the history 
Of that great race, which is to be, 

And one the shaping of a star; 

Until the forward-creeping tides 
Began to foam, and we to draw 
From deep to deep, to where we saw 

A great ship lift her shining sides. 

The man we loved was there on deck, 
But thrice as large as man he bent 
To greet us. Up the side I went. 

And fell in silence on his neck. 



Nay, some such conception as this, of our growing and greaten- 
ing as the years go on, came to one of those who saw Christ 
ascend and heard this prediction of His coming. St. John, 
who saw most deeply and intuitively, wrote long afterward, 
'^Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet 
appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall 
appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is." 
We have seen Him, each one of us, as we are; but with what 
narrowness and dimness of vision, what trembling timidness 
of faith. It remains for us and the world, as we grow in like- 
ness to Him, to grow in fitness to see Him as He is. What 
matter if He should come again many times over, if we could 
not see Him as He is? So in this very prediction of the second 
coming of Christ, there seems to be hinted a provision for men 
to grow other and greater, nay for the growth of a world his- 
tory, in order on something like equal and therefore recognizing 
terms, to meet Him. 

I am not trying here to do anything more than the Scriptures 
themselves do toward dissipating this prophesied return of 
Christ into a merely spiritual and mystical event. It was long 
held to be a literal, bodily coming, and dates were set for it 
within the lifetime of those who saw Him go. St. Paul, scholar 



354 "THE LIFE INDEED 

as he was, in his native Jewish appetency for a sign, 
laid it at first vigorously and vividly on his imagination; and 
in his earliest letter to the Thessalonians he pictured it as close 
at hand, with all its accompaniments of shouting and Arch- 
angel's voice and the trumpet of God and a great multitude of 
embodied and disembodied together caught up to meet the 
Lord in the air; but even in his second letter to the same 
church his ideas were beginning to change, and he would post- 
pone the great event a little, to make room for a previous fall- 
ing away and revelation of the man of sin. In his letter to the 
Corinthians, while he still seems in imagination to hear the 
trumpet, and still figures the event spectacularly, saying we 
shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in 
the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump, yet he no longer 
sets a date, and his coming of Christ seems to be joined with 
a general resurrection. The prophecy, in fact, as time goes 
on, suffers the fate of all prophecies: its sharp outlines gradu- 
ally dislimn, and its details conform themselves more to natural 
ongoings, while the substance and essence of it strikes in- 
ward, becoming a more spiritual and by that very means a 
more real and vital value. The fate of all prophecies, I say, 
however true; if the fate of any great prophecy were other, 
the prophecy would smack too much of private interpretation, 
private to an age, or to a passing date, or to a particular 
people's notions. Men had to learn that no prophecy, if it 
was to avail for a universal humanity, was thus of private in- 
terpretation. A whole heritage of such prophecy, a whole 
stock of ideas about coming things, accumulated from the old 
Jev»^ish regime, was in these early disciples' keeping, and had 
to be either adjusted to new conditions or outgrown. One of 
the first things they discovered was that there was a whole 
effete system of ideas which, as the writer to the Hebrews 
says, was ready to vanish away; it was waiting for only one 
more mighty earthquake to tumble down forever. ''Whose 
voice then shook the earth," the writer says; ''but now hath 
promised, saying. Yet once more I shake not the earth only, 
but also heaven. And this word. Yet once more, signifieth the 



INVENTORT OF VITAL VALUES 355 

removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are 
made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain." 
The disciples little realized, to begin with, what a clean sweep 
of man-made things, hoary old traditions and notions, was 
destined to be made. The idea of a coming judgment and 
assize, for instance, was merely an appendage of the empire of 
law, wherein every man was uncertain, without an external 
will to teach him, whether his works were rewardable or pun- 
ishable; and even before the New Testament times are over 
this judgment idea has about as good as gone by the board; 
for the apostles have discovered that in Christ we have all the 
data for judgment we need, and that in such light of truth not 
only are the saints to judge themselves but to be judges of 
the earth. The era of faith and love is its own light and certi- 
tude; it justifies and ratifies itself; what need then of a grand 
demonstration in the valley of decision, a spectacular assize? 
The same with the idea of a simultaneous and multitudinous 
resurrection of the dead; the sharp lines of this notion begin 
even in the apostles' lifetime to fade, and in fact the date of 
resurrection begins to be squarely identified with the date of 
our committal to His spirit. The Christian is viewed more 
and more clearly as dead to sin and risen with Christ; what 
occasion then for a grand demonstration of resurrection, away 
along in the ages, long after the multitudes of risen lives have 
become complete in Christ? What has been left behind that 
the risen life is ever to have use for? In fact, all this idea 
is the offspring of the obsolete old notion of making up life 
with reference to inevitable death, as if some time everything 
were to end, and we could make a new beginning, if at all, 
only when the end is complete, and then make it, if at all, 
only on the basis of disintegration and ruins, only by patching 
up and mending survived fragments, like the patching up of 
a steel-framed building here and there after the San Francisco 
earthquake. The Christ ideal, with its abolition of death, has 
annulled all that. Mortality is swallowed up of life; this 
men come increasingly to realize; hence physical death be- 
comes a negligible quantity; that is no point at which to set 



356 THE LIFE INDEED 

up our beginning of life, whether survival or resurrection. 
Rather, our initial point is the place where our faith, our whole 
will and energy of being, lays hold of the new life force which 
comes in with the redemption of the body, that redemption 
after which all creation has groaned until now, and which the 
supreme historic venture on the issue of love and faith has 
once for all proved true, valid, an authentic power of highest 
manhood. Redemption is not an end but a beginning, the 
great beginning of life after which we set our dates and number 
our years. So from this point the one issue is, not get- 
ting ready to die, not even getting ready to rise from the dead, 
but making the life that is already proffered us rich and full 
and wise and pure, as a life obeying the functions of perma- 
nent, eternal, ever growing and greatening elements, which 
resolve themselves into elements of love and faith. These 
are our real vitality; these abide while all that is of the senses 
decays and passes; these gather into themselves all the values 
and permanent interests of life. So with these and their in- 
volvements as our outfit, we can disregard the things that die, 
for in us they are already dead. ^'If ye then be risen with 
Christ," one plain and glorious duty remains; ^'seek those 
things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand 
of God." Here is the essential heaven in the present world; 
here is resurrection in this life; the rest, the conjectured con- 
dition of things after that insignificant crisis of physical death, 
is only matter for scientific curiosity or perhaps psychic re- 
search, but does not belong to the principles and motives of 
things. Nay, as we go on, the clean sweep of crude old ideas 
becomes still more portentous and momentous. The whole 
idea of making death a punctuation-point, at which the punc- 
tuation and full-stop of life is merely a clearing off of old 
scores by reward or punishment, the whole basis of world-made 
legislation and justice, has become inoperative and obsolete, 
not because it has passed, but because it has become rudi- 
mentary and as it were automatic, like the reflex and involun- 
tary operations of our body; the abolition, or rather 
absorption, of the whole matter has been provided for and 



INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES 357 

promised, ever since the Father of spirits proclaimed mercy 
greater than justice, ever since we have known of a God who 
forgives all manner of iniquity and transgression and sin, even 
while He would by no means acquit or say that the guilt of 
a broken law of being was not guilt. The basis of judgment 
has become entirely other. Henceforth, though we receive as 
truly as ever according to the deeds done in the body, the 
question of destiny is not that of slaves and culprits dreading 
justice, nor of self-complacent Pharisees putting in claims for 
reward — reward, forsooth, for being true and honest! — but 
rather of how the glad free current of love in us has wrought 
good, as Christ did, to the least and lowest, those who could 
not pay, those from whom, because the love within us is au- 
thentic love, we never dream of demanding pay. True, there 
remains the possibility of a second death; there remains the 
unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit, and what horrors 
hang round that, God forbid that many utterly perverted souls 
may ever know! But this belongs inseparably to the great 
issue of love, as Christ has already drawn it in the twenty-fifth 
of Matthew; to the question whether the soul will freely choose 
its own eternal element, the element of Christ in us, or, its 
manhood instincts working in an awful inverse order, deliber- 
ately choose the impulses and bitter malignity of a fiend. It 
is not the crude issue of justice at all; that is swallowed up in 
redemption and forgiveness; it is the issue of grace, the pure 
unbought love of God working in ^nd through us, our spirits 
consenting, or put away and repudiated, our spirits outraged 
and satanized. The issue is still beyond conception awful; but 
is there not still in this so gloriously evolved manhood, the 
quenchless hope, always fed by the progressive formation of 
Christ in us, that where sin so abounds grace may much more 
abound, and that in the great reckoning God may find in our 
shrinking, struggling life some authentic pulsation of His own 
love, which by its free working, however blindly, may enable 
us to inherit the kingdom prepared for us in our own nature, 
and perfected in our accepted representative, Son of man and 
Son of God? 



358 THE LIFE INDEED 

But we have too long left the prophecy with which we 
started, the prophecy that Christ would come again, that the 
spiritual energy which He awakened would be conserved and 
correlated with humanity by an actual return to earth. That 
prophecy, too, as we have seen, had to pass through modifying 
and transforming phases, sometimes hard to recognize and 
identify with the original prediction; until by the time of the 
Second Epistle of Peter scoffers of the last days are beginning 
to say, ^ 'Where is the promise of his coming? for since the 
fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the 
beginning of the creation." Their spirits could not see what 
is the real glory of that coming, that it smites itself into the 
ongoings of creation, because creation itself is a steady prog- 
ress, an evolution. His coming does not abjure or repudiate 
the rudimental stages of creation, does not treat these as a 
degeneration and ruin, or even as evil; rather it is wrought in 
with them, infusing a spirit into the very centre of them, which 
has limitless powers of seminal quickening and growth. May 
we not say then that Christ in His second coming arrived on 
earth at the day of Pentecost, only a week after the return was 
predicted? That partly is the date we may set; that was 
surely the spiritual coming. But the bodily coming, what of 
that? Ah, here comes in the tremendous enlargement of the 
idea, the marvelous process of making it a universal and 
eternal fact. To have that risen body of Jesus of Nazareth 
with us again, appearing and vanishing at limited points of 
space and so feeding idle curiosity, asserting His restored king- 
liness at momentary points of time, and so keeping the promise 
material and literal, — how would that fulfil the sublime 
promise, what real use could a waiting world, still gazing as 
it were into heaven, make of such sporadic and miraculous 
coming as that? Is it thus that we have seen him go; have 
we made so little use of our post-resurrection enlightenment 
as that? Have we not learned to see in that ascension, the 
whole gracious fulness of humanity, intact and complete in 
body and spirit, vanishing for a space, only in order to return 
in greater reality and power, not as a spectacle for the eyes 



INVENTORT OF VITAL VALUES 359 

but as a vitality for our inmost life? Well then, if we have so 
seen Him go, so in like manner let Him return. It comes back 
to the eyes we have developed to see Him as He is. But mean- 
while, here is the marvelous truth that comes more and more 
to dawn on men like St. Paul and St. John, whose enlightened 
wisdom enables them to see the inside of things. This risen 
spirit of Christ, victorious over the death of the cross, is hence- 
forth engaged in shaping itself a body, a body in which ever 
more sublimely to reappear, a body with all the functions 
which the varied energy and wisdom of man's body may put 
forth to do its work in the world. And the material out of 
which this spirit shapes that body is the vast body of hu- 
manity, with one new life in its members, with all its varieties 
and degrees of endowment, all its applications of function, 
teaching and working and healing according to the individual 
talent and grace, all its powers at the disposal of the whole 
growth of manhood, according to what each joint supplieth. 
This is the form that the returning person of Christ comes 
more and more to take in men's minds. You remember how 
much St. Paul says about the body of Christ; how sometimes 
he figures it as a building, to which those who are in Him con- 
tribute strength and beauty, as it were a divine artistry; how 
oftener he figures it as a colossal universal body of believers, 
Christ the Head sending forth wisdom and spiritual impulse 
to all the members, or sometimes the very life and body as 
a whole, to which human heads and hands and hearts are 
vitally related, as the branches to the vine. The figure is too 
great and comprehensive for St. Paul to manage consistently; 
but it is this view of things to which the prediction of His 
coming resolves itself. Nay more: men come to see that Christ 
Himself is not yet complete, but that He is being developed 
out of the varied elements of manhood ; that we are all builders 
of the Christ in our degree, that it takes a whole hu- 
manity to express Him in heart and soul, that we may even 
do something to fill up what is behind of His sufferings and 
sacrifice. It is a conception in which imagination is almost 
lost and baffled; but it is the only conception which makes 



36o THE LIFE INDEED 

the prophecy as true as the world and ages, that conception 
of humanity as not many things but one body, working har- 
moniously in one spirit, and growing from glory to transfigured 
glory, ''Till we all come, in the unity of the faith, and of the 
knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the 
measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." Can we say 
now, with this tremendous interpretation in mind, that Christ 
did not come again, or ask doubtfully after the promise of His 
coming; can we say that He is not coming, after all that we 
have traced in His personality, so in like manner as we have 
seen Him go? Oh, friends, how have we seen Him go, with 
what spirit and reality and power? Even as the power and vi- 
tality of a mighty new evolution, whereby the final stadium of 
manhood even now, in that history wherein a thousand years 
are as one day, is being steadily and majestically traversed. 
Away with Renan's sentimental pulings over the sad departure 
of Christ. The body of Christ is with us now, is us; and to 
each one of us it is given, whether a vessel to honor or dishonor, 
to be in our place and work a living member. So it is, by this 
second coming, that manhood is all the while being made, ac- 
cording to the pattern shown us in the mount. Need we seek 
a more glorious evolution than this, even though, while eyes 
to see Him as He is are still weak and astigmatic, we know 
not what we shall be? Such agnosticism as this is a saving 
agnosticism, for we know the potency of greater things, and 
in our own unitary body of manhood we are using it. If as 
yet we see through a glass darkly, it is only because we are 
still in the turmoil of evolution; the lower world within us 
still struggles to obscure the higher; and as with St. Paul the 
battle is still on, though its issue is no longer uncertain. We 
fight in undismayed hope, and in the joy of greatening light, 
for the boundless powers of love and faith are yet far from 
explored and proved; and these are shaping us within. 

Where is one that, bom of woman, altogether can escape 
From the lower world within him, moods of tiger, or of ape? 

Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning Age of ages, 
Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape? 



INVENTORT OF VITAL VALUES 361 

All about him shadow still, but, while the races flower and fade, 
Prophet-eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on the shade, 

Till the peoples all are one, and all their voices blend in choric 
Hallelujah to the Maker "It is finish'd. Man is made." 

IMeanwhile a mighty Spirit of life is consciously with us and in 
us, reconciling the world to Himself, to His cross and to the 
power of His resurrection; nor is His work destined to cease 
or slacken, but rather to grow in wisdom and scope, until that 
other prophecy is fulfilled: "Then cometh the end, when he 
shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father ; 
when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and 
power. For he must reign till he hath put all enemies under 
his feet. . . . And when all things shall be subdued unto 
him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that 
put all things under him, that God may be all in all." So it 
is, in this new era of light. Already there is looming before 
illuminate souls a larger unity still, when the perfected hu- 
manity, Head and members alike, shall be merged in Him 
from whom the whole vast evolution proceeds; when creature 
and Creator shall be no more twain in spirit but fully and har- 
moniously at one. 

But while thus this prophecy of the Christ that is to be 
enlarges itself to a vast breadth, until it becomes the forecast 
of a universal social evolution, let us not forget or think away 
its beginning; let us not be of those who in order to contain 
one idea must deny another. The social consciousness which 
is so characteristic of our time tends to merge the individual 
in the crowd; tends to rub off the angles and outlying peculi- 
arities of individuality, and make the personal soul, who seems 
to himself such a world in himself, a mere bolt or pinion in 
a vast communal organism, whose mind is not his, nor a 
centred mind at all, but the mind of some colossal diffusion. 
This tendency spreads itself also over the unseen future; so 
that this final unity in God loses personal bounds and becomes 
a vague Buddhism and nirvana. Not to be ourselves, not to 
retain what is unique and characteristic in us, our talents, our 
acquirements, our individual traits of being, — what would a 



362 THE LIFE INDEED 

survival like this be worth? The thought of this is a source 
of much trouble to persons who love life as it is, with its lights 
and shades, its individual ties and comrade relations; they 
shrink from it, in fervent echo of Tennyson's remonstrance: 

That each, who seems a separate whole, 
Should move his rounds, and fusing all 
The skirts of self again, should fall 

Remerging in the general Soul, 

Is faith as vague as all un sweet: 

Eternal form shall still divide 

The eternal soul from all beside; 
And I shall know him when we meet: 

And we shall sit at endless feast, 

Enjoying each the other's good: 

What vaster dream can hit the mood 
Of Love on earth? 

Our return to the scene from which we have started furnishes, 
I think, the wholesome corrective of this vague doubt. "In 
like manner as ye have seen Him go," — how, we must ask 
again, have we seen Him go? As a mysterious Being indeed, 
whose strange physical nature we had gradually learned to 
dissociate from our body of clay; but still, when He vanished 
into light and cloud. He vanished as a body, as a glorified 
organism, with its functions and individual traits all intact; 
nay, going from us as the one perfectly evolved human Per- 
sonality the world ever saw. In Him we have seen individu- 
ality complete and finished; it is the social Christ, the diffused 
Christ, whose evolution still waits and grows. And when, a 
few months or years later. He stood again in light beyond 
noonday, to answer the question of Saul of Tarsus, 'Who art 
thou, Lord?" so far from being remerged into the diffused love 
that fills the universe, He still said, "I am Jesus of Nazareth, 
whom thou persecutest." In other words, the resurrection 
whose power we aspire to know, if not a resurrection of the 
flesh, is nevertheless revealed to us as the resurrection of the 
body, a true and authentic body, with all that bodily organism 
essentially implies; that is what distinguishes His going out 



INVENTORT OF VITAL VALUES 363 

of life from mere spiritual survival; that is just what He be- 
gan to teach us by His transfiguration, referring us to the 
resurrection for the meaning of it, referring us to this rather 
than to the resuscitation of Lazarus. That is the grand new 
truth impressed upon us by His uprise from the dead. There 
is a natural body, a physical body as St. Paul calls it, the or- 
ganism of the natural life, and it dies; there is also a spiritual 
body, the organism of a larger and diviner life, and even though 
it freely consents to death, it lives; lives not by killing the 
physical body but by redeeming it, buying it back as it were 
from its pains and bondages and fitting it for a purer inheri- 
tance. Just as within the blinded eye of Milton there was an 
inner power of sight; just as within the deadened ear of 
Beethoven there was the power to hear and create symphonies, 
so though our whole outward man perish the real man, the in- 
ward man, is not yielding to death, but may be renewed day 
by day. Not an abstruse or unreasonable idea this: that the 
most real and characterizing body of ours is not our flesh and 
nerves but inside our flesh and nerves, transfiguring us by the 
renewal of our mind, and waiting only to step some day out of 
its temporary tent, its outw^orn placenta, and be born as the one 
adequate organism of our true life, a house not made with 
hands. In such a revelation death is in all literalness 
abolished; its truer name is birth. 

Now if this is so, here is opened a field not only for the 
discoveries of religion, but for the research of open-eyed, open- 
minded, liberal science. We have got indeed beyond the realm 
of the tissues, but not beyond the realm of the body; we are 
still legitimately in the field of an enlarged and fair-minded 
biology. We are at least in an interpretation of life to which, 
if science cannot yet say Yea, it certainly cannot say Nay. It 
has tried, arrogantly enough, to say Nay, and to pin the body 
and spirit alike down to matter; but all its narrowing asser- 
tions, as time went on, have suffered confusion and shipwreck. 
What is matter? it has asked; and by the time it had got 
matter all sweetly reduced to little balls or polyhedra called 
atoms, out of which it could build everything we see, along 



364 THE LIFE INDEED 

came radium and strange electric ions of force, which circu- 
lated freely through the minutest of their atoms, as we roam 
about in the world; nay, men are beginning to wonder if an 
atom of hydrogen may not be a completely furnished world in 
itself. Countless energies there are, with all the marks of 
design and intelligence, and with strange potencies to mould 
matter, which yet can go freely through the densest matter, 
as the risen body of Jesus is represented to have stood sud- 
denly in the midst, though the doors were shut. Men are all 
at sea about matter itself; and are in doubt whether they ought 
to say substance at all, whether it is not all reducible to energy. 
The whole universe down to its minutest speck, seems alive; 
and every atom seems to have in it the organic completeness 
of the whole. Where does life begin or end; what does it 
mean; what smallest or greatest body is not furnished with it? 
Is it electricity; is it light; is it blind and fortuitous, or is it 
intelligence? And if, as we know life, it is endowed with con- 
sciousness and will, what smallest speck of protoplasm is not 
endowed with its due degree of individuality, of consciousness 
and will? Surely, in the light of such unanswerable questions, 
which are only specimens from a limitless multitude, science 
can no longer say No to the idea of a body which, let us say, 
may have such relation to a luminiferous ether, which exists, 
though no man can measure it, as our natural body has to the 
air. I do not say this is so. But that there is a spiritual body, 
to which space and time are no longer a bridle and bondage, 
is the tremendous idea to which, through the powers and de- 
mands of the spirit, the Scripture squarely leads us; and 
science, in spite of itself, is forced in the same direction. If 
this is so, then science and Scripture alike, have room for their 
evolution, their growth of life out of dying matter into the ful- 
ness of its promise. Death is not death; it is change and tran- 
sition. Nor does it have to be transition into a far-off land, 
or to an unknowable perhaps. The other world may, after 
all, be within our world, as the spiritual body is already within 
our body; complete and organized, like the new Jerusalem 
getting ready to come from God out of heaven; we cannot, 



INFENTORT OF VITAL VALUES 365 

even on scientific grounds, say No to this. Who can say that 
Cardinal Newman's picture is not literally and factually true: 
''And yet, in spite of this universal world which we see, there 
is another world, quite as far-spreading, quite as close to us, 
and more wonderful; another world all around us, though we 
see it not, and more wonderful than the world we see, for this 
reason if for no other, that we do not see it. All around us 
are numberless objects, coming and going, watching, working 
or waiting, which we see not: this is that other world, which 
the eyes reach not unto, but faith only." 

Faith only; but faith is no bar to knowledge, rather a 
promoter of it; no imaginative dream, or denial of what we 
see, rather the endowment of eyes that see more deeply, and 
the spur to research and realization; faith is a vitality, a ven- 
ture, an initiative energy, a living as if this were so. What 
has come of such faith when it has its perfect work, working 
by love and purifying the heart, our whole course of study has 
shown us, with its supreme historic venture, unfolding to us 
the Life Indeed. And the privilege of exploring its resources, 
as it deepens and broadens, is ours forever; it lures us on, from 
every lowly spot whereon we stand, to life more and fuller, 
until by its vital energy we 

reach the ultimate, angels' law, 

Indulging every instinct of the soul 

There where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing! 

So now we have traversed our course of study, and reached 
the supreme point where the Life Indeed, having established 
its law and its principle of growth and continuance, having 
also filled and ennobled this earthly existence, is ready for, 
nay has already essentially made, its transition to a higher 
and larger sphere of being. A manhood evolution passing won- 
derful it is, that we have reviewed, as simple and elemental as 
it is far-reaching and complex. What now, in one deepest word, 
does it all mean? 

One great idea I have approached several times, several times 
seen it standing large and majestic in my path, and yet have 



366 THE LIFE INDEED 

felt an invincible awe about exploring it and as it were pro- 
nouncing verdict upon it, until more testimony was in, more 
data for coordinating its elements with our general evolu- 
tionary view. There seemed to be in it something very real 
and very fundamental, which when the fitting moment came 
we must not miss or ignore; and yet somehow my eyes were 
holden. And now that we reach the summit, and have a whole 
ordered course to look back upon, that idea seems all at once 
to stand out clear and plain, as the colossal key to the entire 
marvelous history. It is the great living evolving truth of 
atonement; let us pronounce the name according to its simple 
and winsome English derivation, at-one-ment. We have trav- 
ersed the inner history of a manhood so evolved by the power 
of the spirit of life as to be fully and finally at one with the 
creative spirit that has wrought upon and within it. 

For many years thinkers, you and I with the rest, have been 
baffled by the magnitude of this idea of atonement. It would 
not let itself be cramped into our narrow and crude definitions. 
The truth of it, in some large sense, we did not doubt; but to 
define a thing is to limit it; and out of every such limitation 
arose a feeling of remonstrance, the sense of what atonement 
is not, or at best of what it is only in part. It is not the ap- 
peasing of an enraged God; it is not, in the grotesque 
old mediaeval idea, the paying off of the devil for the souls that 
have become his due; nor the liquidation of our huge debt of 
law in a lump sum; of these negations we are very sure. Nor, 
true as vicarious suffering is of the noblest manhood, can we 
quite satisfy ourselves with the idea of one of our race being 
substituted for the rest, as if then the rest had nothing further 
to do but contemplate and rejoice; nor any more, mighty as 
is the grip of Christ's influence upon us, does it exhaust itself 
in moral influence; for still the question is open, influence to 
do or be what? Men have, I am inclined to think, over-empha- 
sized the duty of sheer sacrifice for its own sake; they have 
sometimes made it a kind of fetish; as if there were any more 
intrinsic virtue in giving up everything without a motive than 



INVENTORY OF VITAL VALUES ^67 

there is in strongly and wisely subduing everything. But not 
to multiply untenable or partial aspects, there is about all these 
a note of the artificial, as if atonement were a made product, 
not to say an ingenious fiction, instead of something elemental 
and intrinsic in manhood. And perhaps the most deeply 
doubted of all, saving as are its effects on this score, is the idea 
that atonement is an after-thought and makeshift; as if in 
order that it be brought about at all man must first have fallen 
and become a ruined nature, and as if therefore atonement 
were not really a creative thing, an at-one-ment with God from 
the beginning, but essentially a colossal piece of mending and 
cobbler work. We do not like to make it a thing so casual and 
adventitious; what becomes thus of the Lamb slain from the 
foundation of the world? We cannot rest in its being only as 
large as degeneration; we want it to be as large as the mighty 
evolution itself, an at-one-ment that is vital and valid for sin- 
less as well as sinful manhood, and as such not an artificial but 
self-illuminating and self-evidencing thing. 

Is such a conception of atonement obtainable? I think we 
come nearer to it by the line of thought we have been following 
than in any other way; though in trying to sketch it I warn 
you I am not the author of it; I lay it all, with its evolutionary 
assumptions, to the Bible. It rests with an enlarged science, 
perhaps, to say whether it is possible or impossible, or to defer 
judgment until we know something about our world; at any 
rate it is abysmally deep and it is eminently consistent with 
itself, as it were a grand poetic justice. 

Its basis is a simple naive object-lesson pursued and re- 
vealed through centuries. It begins with the tacit assumption 
that man, when God breathed into his nostrils the breath of 
life and he became a living soul, was not made for death, as 
death has come to be his lot; that is, that there was in his 
frame and flesh no intrinsic necessity of passing into a higher 
state disembodied and by the way of disease or violence or 
decrepitude, but perhaps by some such way as we see adum- 
brated on the mount of transfiguration and later on the Mount 



368 THE LIFE INDEED 

of Olives where Christ disappeared from our senses. If man 
had remained at one with God in childlike dependence and un- 
questioning obedience and sinlessness, that way was open to 
him, a kind of melting naturally from the sensualized form 
of being to the etherealized. But man chose rather to be at 
one with God in a sense which, though it entailed grave conse- 
quences, was really higher and more penetrative of the God 
nature ; he chose to be as gods, knowing good and evil, that is, 
he chose knowledge and initiative enterprise and power to sub- 
due the earth; and in so doing he virtually chose what we call 
death, that is^ the other and more painful way of exit from this 
stage of being. "In the day that thou eatest of it thou shalt 
surely die," had been his warning; but in spite of this there 
was in him the overweening impulse to stronger, less sweetly 
childlike things, and his spirit dared, and his eyes were opened, 
and he fell — upward. At the same time he put himself at 
disadvantage even with the animals from which he had sprung; 
for their death, though natural and inevitable, has not the 
shrinking horror and dread about it that man's has; they, in 
their instinctive submission, beat him in passing out of life. 
There are still left us landmarks in the object-lesson to show 
what might have been: Enoch, walking in utter childlike de- 
pendence with God, "was not, for God took him"; Moses, in 
his great meekness of legal order and wise leadership, passed 
in his Creator's arms; Elijah, in his single-minded prophetic 
zeal, fiery like his nature, passed in fire and flame to another 
stage of being. Highest of all, when, a week after He had 
announced His Messiahship, our Lord stood on the mount of 
transfiguration, and these exceptional men stood with Him, He 
had the offer of just such an exit; it seems to have been the nat- 
ural evolution of perfect sinlessness. Does it not seem to tell us 
that the whole race might have gone that way, entering by a 
painless metamorphosis on its prepared heritage, if it had not 
chosen the way of initiative wisdom and pain and death? Nay, 
this object-lesson seems to show, that sin is no more an ele- 
mental necessity of manhood than of the animals: the spirit- 



INVENTORT OF VITAL VALUES 369 

ual instinct, so to say, is wholesome and sound. But about 
all these exceptional lives with their manner of passing, nay, we 
dare to say even about the life of Jesus up to this point, we 
get a sense of limitation; life's deepest resources are not all 
embodied there; there is still about them a kind of passiveness, 
supineness, lack of individual venture, which in spite of its 
sinless purity leaves some higher reach of manhood yet to be 
revealed. So there on the mountain these hitherto highest rep- 
resentatives of humanity talk about still another exit from life, 
which Jesus, strong in His sense and duty of Messiahship, 
chooses instead of the easy way that here is offered. There is 
still another way, essential to the highest manhood spirit, of 
being at one with the Father of spirits, a final depth and height 
in which, when it is complete, both God and man shall be re- 
vealed as they most truly are. What is it, what could be more 
than fully evolved innocence and sinlessness? 

God is love, says the Bible's deepest and ripest definition of 
Him. The problem of being at one with Him, then, is the 
problem of being at one with love, in all the involvements that 
life has created for it. It goes beyond passive innocence into 
active, holy, vital work and sacrifice, not the sheer blind sacri- 
fice of abnegation, but the vigorous, voluntary, fruitful sacri- 
fice, of effecting a union of human hearts and human lives in 
one spirit of love. It goes beyond the shrewdness and studied 
order of wisdom, of which the world is full, committing itself 
fearlessly, patiently, hopefully to activities which are the su- 
preme unwisdom of men, but which prove through time to be 
the far-reaching wisdom and power of God. How far and how 
deep it goes we have Gethsemane with its bitter cup, we have 
the cross with its shame and torture, we have the awful realiza- 
tion of aloneness, of separation at once from God and manhood, 
to tell us. And it goes on, as we see, not by the way of revolu- 
tion or rebellion, but by the way of greater obedience, obedi- 
ence even to the death of the cross. But it is the death of 
death; and from the grave which so long ago man chose rises 
a new life, which no death can grasp or hold, a life henceforth 



370 THE LIFE INDEED 

clear and available, on the same terms, to a whole renewed hu- 
manity. Is not this the self-illuminating definition that we 
have sought, a definition that no longer limits or makes its 
way by ingenuity? This is the Life Indeed, the supreme 
atonement, the fully revealed majesty and glory of being at 
one with God. 



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